The Road to Cydonia
by Cap'n Chryssalid
Summary: Ch33: Auribus Teneo Lupum. The Visitors launch a major offensive to cripple UNETCO on multiple fronts. Ryouga and India Squad sortie to engage the enemy directly, while Ranma and Juliet Squad face the insidious menace itself, deep within their minds.
1. Address Unknown Part I

New Introductory author's notes:

This fanfic takes place some time after the end of the Ranma manga, and late into the operation of XCOM. The aliens being who they are, there will be some harsh scenes of what they plan to do with humanity. This is both part of the XCOM canon, and to drive home that these aren't Star Trek aliens.

For more XCOM info, check out the New UFOpedia hosted on my website.

Now, I'm picking up where I left off with The Road to Cydonia. Again, my apologies for the delay, but oh boy has there been a lot in the meantime. That's ok, though, because I think this take on it is going to be better than my original plans! First, I'm going to go over these first three chapters, and make all the little corrections missed by myself and pointed out by others, then on to the new stuff.

I've been tempted to write about XCOM for a while now, and I've recently jumped back on the Ranma Train. I've taken some liberties with the source material, but will endeavor to remain as true to it as possible – though by nature mixing these two stories is a contradiction in and of itself. There isn't much else to say. The chapterettes of this will be shorter than my norm (roughly eleven pages instead of twenty) so updates should be quicker, and hopefully I will get more people reading it in the first place (long chapters, it seems, tend to scare people).

Enjoy!

Engage New Disclaimer: 3. 2. 1. Mark. This story is based upon the original characters, situations and works of Rumiko Takahashi and the people of Microprose. All other characters, unless otherwise specified, that are not a product of these two sources, are the product of the author. While many of the locations mentioned are real, do not expect them to be taken perfectly in context. Pop Culture references are property of… whomever. There'll probably be lots of 'em. The story itself is, of course, fiction.

* * *

The year is 2005. For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars.

* * *

**The Road To Cydonia**

Chapter I

_Address Unknown_

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

Twenty-three miles East of _Nagaoka,_ far from city lights, alone under the watchful eyes of the stars, a small fire glowed brightly amid the trees. Down, beneath the crowns of tall Japanese firs and cedars, a solitary shape moved. Highlighted by the nearby flames, its motions were fluid and practiced. To a detached outside observer, they would have appeared calm and serene, as would have the face of the young man practicing his Art in this place of solitude.

It was a calm that, like the ocean, belied a more forceful intent.

Ryouga Hibiki, eighteen years old, paused in his meditative _kata_ and looked up over his shoulder. Suspended high in the sky, the blanket of stars twinkled mischievously in all their glory. Ryouga watched them, however, not with wonder but undisguised suspicion. He paused only a few seconds before returning to what passed leisure. He was still training, as he always did, but now he was allowing his mind to cool in the aftermath of a long day of physical hardship. Behind him, a small concrete reservoir the size of a bath tub released wisps of steam into the air.

He knew many would see it as unprofessional but the so called lost boy had several of his own styles of preferred _katas_, modified from those his father had handed down to him over a decade ago. And then there were the others, taken from a different source. They had little to do with his combat style in practice, but that was likely why he found them so relaxing. The movements were (he was rather ashamed to admit) taken directly from the Saotome School of Anything Goes Martial Arts, and the _kata_ was a direct derivation of one of their own, with only a slight change in the opening stance.

There was something about the sweeping moves, light steps, and confident motions that gave Ryouga a measure of satisfaction and peace he normally couldn't find in his more aggressive _katas_. He also believed that, by running through the Saotome _kata_, he could better find flaws in Ranma's own techniques. Ranma had always been faster than him, and Ryouga had largely given up hope of surpassing him in that respect, instead focusing his efforts on better predicting the pigtailed one's own movements and attacks, and refining and expanding his own repertoire of special techniques.

So far, there had been mixed results.

Beside him, the fire, trapped within a ring of large stones, hissed and crackled angrily. A small furnace nearby smoked peacefully. Ryouga finished the sixty-nine motions of the borrowed Anything Goes _kata_, exhaled deeply, and slowly turned around to look behind him. Like most of his peers, he had a well-developed danger sense tied to his _ki_. He could literally feel most attacks coming. And his had been bugging him, off and on, for well over a week.

Still, nothing had come of it.

Random animals hadn't attacked him (be they giant boars, bears or man-eating plants) in two months. No: the only animals he'd scuffled with recently were domesticated. He frowned a little at that, his facial features settling into their natural state. He walked over to a nearby bucket of water, and started washing his hands. The cold stung him at first, as he moved his fingers over his knuckles, washing away bits of blood and burned broken skin.

They would be fully healed by tomorrow, so he wasn't worried.

Toweling off his hands, and then using another part of the rag on his face, he paused to look at the tiny embroidered black piglet that was stitched onto a corner of the woven material. He folded the towel in half, hiding the design from view, and draped it over his bare shoulders. Pouring the water over the fire, he made sure the last few embers died down before taking his leave. Having spent so long in forests and the like, he had no desire to start a potentially devastating fire in what was (sometimes to his annoyance) his 'home' turf.

Still holding the bucket, he looked around for a few seconds before spotting the end of a thick hemp rope attached to a nearby tree. Resting his hands on it, he followed it through the forest, for once very sure of where he would end up. Akari had been very smart in suggesting it to him, when he had told her of his desire to train away from the farm. Since his idea of training occasionally included experimentation with _shishi hokodans _and _bakusai tenketsus_, not to mention his new construction martial arts project, she was happy to have it occur in the woods a kilometer from the house.

Ryouga smiled when he thought of her, but frowned again when he thought of the farm. And the pigs. Akari may have loved them, but one of the reasons Ryouga had felt the need to train away from the farm was that he was starting to get sick of the animals. Hell, he had been sick of them the moment he'd gotten downwind of them. He hadn't been particularly fond of swine before his _Jusenkyou_ curse, and he was even less so now. He trained them out of duty; out of affection for Akari. He tolerated them for her sake, and because he couldn't bear the thought of taking her from her beloved pets (or wards, or whatever) due to his own selfishness. But that was as far as it went.

The irony of it was that he probably wouldn't have minded so much if not for his curse, and that he would likely have never even met her if not for it. Such was life, it seemed, full of complications. So many more now, than back when all he had to worry about was revenge on one Ranma Saotome. Back then, there had been no gray area, no need for compromises, there had been good and evil. Only years after the feud began, under far from optimal conditions, did he slowly start to realize that Ranma was not what he had long imagined him to be. Again: it was something he would likely have never realized if not for Akane, the same girl who had kept the two rivals at each other's throats.

"Ranma… this is all your fault," the lost boy said, with a fanged grin. There was much he still disliked about Ranma, but there was a measure of acceptance, too. Somewhere along the line, he had gone from hating Ranma, to disliking him, to… respecting him. Ryouga shook his head. Admitting it still left a slightly bitter taste in his mouth.

It was hard letting go of the past.

"Akari," Ryouga said her name, and his smile was back. She was the light of his life, his welcoming beacon on a long dark shore. Her smile warmed him to his core and made him forget his worries, and her soft touch made him ache to hold her in his arms. She wasn't a bad cook, either.

Even at his leisurely pace, he came upon the house quickly, walking along a slightly winding dirt path. Soon, he could see lights just beyond the bushes and trees. It was bright. Very bright.

Too bright.

* * *

Akari Unryu hummed as she cooked, hands moving with a practiced confidence that mirrored Ryouga's, almost a mile away. In front of her, a green bell pepper split into two perfect halves, before being quickly quartered and then sliced into clean strips. Cutting away the seeds and the core, she washed them and put them aside. Small local onions and store bought chilies followed, before she checked on the marinade and the Mongolian wok.

A room away, the satellite television played an American show called 'West Wing.' Akari only caught the occasional glance while she worked, but it was taping, so she wasn't unduly worried. It was the season finale, too, even though the show was a year behind in Japan. One of Akari's favorite characters, a smart young woman named Donna, was in the hospital after her car hit a road bomb in Gaza while she was talking to a cute man who was also British and a photographer. She doubted they'd kill Donna off, but it was nice to see how everyone sent flowers and how Josh visited her. There was also something about the President having to throw a pitch at a baseball game, and not knowing how, but that was just a little side plot, really.

Akari wondered why Ryouga didn't seem to like the show.

Then again, Ryouga didn't seem to like anything on the television. He helped with the pigs, did work around the farm, and then went off to train. Sometimes, he lay down on the couch to read, but he seemed to spend more time outside of the house than in. Even when there was nothing to do. Akari sighed, wishing that just once he'd spend time with her, doing something together besides teaching giant pigs to wrestle.

Maybe they should take a trip to the city?

Cooking the noodles, adding them to the wok, Akari idly planned out how they'd spend the day. She had waited for him to get over his infatuation with Akane Tendo, she could wait for him to slowly wean off his wandering tendencies. Hopefully, by then, he'd also go a little easier on his body. Recently, his training had worried her, even after he had explained that it was mostly harmless, and would help him get a job. Still, she was sure it was only a matter of time before he became more settled, and then he would propose, and they would live happily ever after.

"Ryouga. Strong as a pig, smart as a pig…" Akari blushed. "Passionate as a pig."

She knew he didn't like the comparison, and never made it in his presence, but it was true! He was so wonderful! And the work he did with the Sumo classes – she could see the improvement in her fighters already. Last week, Katsunishiki had successfully defended his title as _yokozuna_, as sumo champion, easily demolishing the unworthy competition. Only the hated Banryu Farm contenders had posed a problem, and Akari knew they were pumped full of steroids and kami-knew-what. She shook her head in disgust. Oh, how she disliked those Banryu farmers! One day, she vowed, the Unryu farm would finally settle the feud and put them in their place!

Thoughts of it turned her mind towards the next generation. Katsunishiki wasn't getting any younger, and soon she would have to see to the rearing of a fifteenth generation champion sumo pig. And maybe, by then, she'd have some 'piglets' of her own to take to the tournament. She giggled at the thought, knowing Ryouga would have blushed and grumpily scoffed at the nickname.

"Grandfather!" Akari called out, as she finished cooking tonight's main dish. "Dinner in ten minutes, ok?"

She looked up at the digital clock on the microwave.

9:34

They were eating late, as usual. Just like every night Ryouga stayed out training. Still, Akari didn't mind. She knew he was coming back, at least, and that he wouldn't end up lost wandering around Japan for a month or two. Walking over to the table, in the family room, she began setting things up. She could smell the food in the kitchen as it cooled, and Akari silently hoped Ryouga made it back before it got cold. He had insisted they eat without him if he wasn't back by nine thirty, and by the ravenous way he ate whatever she cooked (hot, cold, or microwave lukewarm) she knew his tardiness wasn't due to a lack of appreciation.

His Art just came first.

A part of her was jealous, even though it was silly to be so over something that wasn't even tangible. Besides, it was his Art – his strength – that helped make him such a perfect man. Without it, he would never have been able to defeat Katsunishiki. Even in light of that, the sheer devotion he had for martial arts was somewhat… unnerving at times. She supposed it would always be that way.

Akane could understand that, too, since Ranma was the same way.

In fact, Akane would understand it better than she would. After all, the youngest Tendo was not only a member of a martial arts family, and part of a martial arts school, but she practiced it as well. Akari didn't have the luxury of first hand experience with the Art. She took care of her pigs, and she taught them, but she was not (and would never be) a martial artist herself. For her, there would always be some aspect of her chosen that was unreadable, and almost beyond fathoming.

The Art.

The Fight.

Not for the title of _yokozuna_, or for prize money, or even for fame and glory: but for pride and for the pursuit of being the best. Akari returned from the kitchen with the sealed rice cooker and set it down on the table. As she did so, her eyes turned to the television. A long line of static had cut the picture in half, and the voices were interrupted by hissing. Her petite eyebrows creased, as she wondered what was wrong with the dish on the roof.

Then the lights flickered, and the static on the television became all encompassing. Even as poorly refined as her senses were (in comparison to many of her new acquaintances in Nerima) she felt an overwhelming sense of unease in the air. And what was happening was no simple blackout. In seconds, the house was plunged into darkness.

At first, the only light Akari saw came from the bright stars outside.

And then something new came, outside the house, near the pens. It was a bright light, whitish blue, and it was accompanied by a distant humming, steady and mechanical. The light disappeared for a second, before appearing again. Outside, it moved along the ground, almost like a searchlight, but it seemed be one big bright ball and not a cone from any airborne projector.

Akari Unryu backpedaled, feeling panic well up in her throat, trying to be released as a scream. She pushed it back down, not wanting to draw attention. The brightness from outside met the wall of the house, and slipped through it, engulfing the entire room. Her heart pounding, Akari felt it wash over her. At first it was warm, like the sun, but had none of the gentle caress of that star, and when it left, chills followed.

Outside, she heard the startled grunts and squeals of the pigs.

'What's happening…?' Akari gasped, as she felt a weight on her mind, numbing her thoughts. 'Ryouga!'

Between the house and the pens, a handful of thin shapes resolved themselves, highlighted by the glowing light. Akari felt tears on her cheeks. Her mouth moved, but no words came out. Screaming only made her throat convulse. Three of the five shapes moved towards the house.

Sense overrode fear, and she tried to run.

But like her voice, her body was unresponsive. Paralyzed! Behind her, she knew there were knives in the kitchen. There was a heavy basement door, too. Grandfather had always told her that if the house was broken into, she should run down there and lock the door. She willed her body to move, and her hand trembled.

Then the door creaked open, and though no sound escaped her lips…

Akari Unryu screamed.

* * *

"He's struggling! Hold him down!"

"That's what I'm… tryin' ta do Doc!"

"He's broken the restraints! If you can't hold him still, I won't be able to hit the pressure p…"

* * *

SHOW ME

Cicadas.

'Where am I?'

The point of the umbrella descended like a bomb, the force of gravity and muscle driving it down. His target, the pigtailed boy, moved just in time to avoid the strike. That was a fine thing – finishing him off with a surprise blow held no appeal. This was just a little demonstration of what was to come. Two pairs of eyes met, one wide and surprised the other narrow and vengeful.

Below them, the ground compacted into a crater over a meter in radius.

MORE

No. I'm wrong: I hear chattering, but too loud to be cicadas.

'Where am I?'

Akane's beautiful smile filled him with a mixture of fear and expectation. He was frozen in place, unable to move, as she held him in her hands. He wanted to move, to jump away and escape, but her touch was warm and electric. He felt safe. And then he realized what she was going to do, and torn between humiliation and expectation, he felt her lips press softly against his snout.

NO

He twirled the ribbon, confident in having knowledge of its use that surely surpassed Ranma's. Cloth manipulation was a cornerstone of the Hibiki Family Martial Arts, and that included a thorough introduction and mastery of Rhythmic Gymnastics. It was the foundation for the Iron Cloth Technique, after all. Ranma, and even this Kodachi girl, surely could not think beyond the first two levels of that aspect of the Art. Rythmic Gymnastics was a style of weapon mastery, evolving out of ancient ninja arts, whereby anything could be used as a weapon. It was a training exercise for the third step: thinking of clothing itself as a weapon, and not just a means to obtain one.

He lashed out, smirking, nailing Ranma on the head with a weighted ball. It was something of a cheap shot, since Akane had distracted the pigtailed boy, but Ryouga knew the only thing wounded was the boy-turned-girl's pride. As he watched Akane talk to Ranma-chan, he scowled deeply, again mulling over whether to help or hinder his enemy. He wanted Akane to be avenged, but he also wanted to destroy Ranma's happiness. Choices. Choices!

He snapped the ribbon taunt, and planned out his next series of attacks.

MORE

Curse that Azusa girl! He couldn't get the damn collar off… what was it made of, titanium?

NO

He descended with the massive block of ice; seemly intending to crushing his smaller opponent with its sheer weight. The diameter of a full-grown man, it was more than capable of killing any normal human. Of course, Ranma Saotome was far from normal. Just as Ryouga had punched the ice boulder Ranma had thrown at him, so the pigtailed girl did the same, just as Ryouga made as if to slam it down. He had expected this.

Quick as lightning, using the ice boulder as distraction, he got behind her and wrapped his arms around her midsection. For a heartbeat, the sensation of how she felt surprised him. He still thought of her as Ranma, but she felt completely different. Not just smaller and trimmer, but undeniably feminine. He ignored this, however, and set his legs on the unsteady ice. For someone of his strength, the suplex or _suplay_ was child's play. The crown of Ranma's head hit the ice perfectly perpendicular. Again: it was a move that would likely have broken the neck of any normal person if it didn't kill them with the resulting concussion and brain hemorrhaging.

Under Ranma's head, the ice cracked, a split running for over ten meters in length, and a meter deep.

YES

MORE

Almost like teeth grinding together, but so fast and so loud.

'Where am I?'

MORE

He silently cursed. Bad enough that the girl had kneed him in the face, and weighed him down by sitting in his lap, now her partner was falling, leg extended to deliver the final blow? He mentally noted the height, and the gleaming edge of the skater's blades. He'd been kicked by those same skates before, and while it hurt, it wasn't life threatening, even from that height. Mikado seemed to be aiming for the neck – a wise decision given Ryouga's prone position. A blow would hurt like hell, and worse… send him into the cold water just inched below and behind.

Desperation filled him, granting him one last chance to salvage his situation. His mind raced, looking for a solution. He thought about kicking Azusa into her partner, but the thought of hitting a girl who wasn't Ranma grated on him, even if she was an annoying idiot. Ranma couldn't be used as a shield, not in the position they were in. He could blow the blow and save himself from injury, but the momentum would still force him into the water. No: he had to intercept Mikado, and soon.

Ryouga's hands found purchase in the massive floating slabs of the ice rink he had destroyed. The idea was so simple! All he had to do was pray his strength was up to the task. At the optimal moment in Mikado's attack, just two meters from his target, Ryouga extended his _ki_ into the ice, keeping it from splintering. Then, with all the raw muscle he could spare, he lifted the blocks out of the water and over his head, like the two jaws of a beartrap. Azusa still unharmed in his lap, Ranma keeping him out of the water at his feet, he crushed Mikado less than a body length before the skater's blow would have connected.

With one last colossal final heave, he threw the two blocks of ice (and the skater smashed between them) to the other side of the rink, where tons of frozen water crashed and broke against the concrete.

YES

MORE

The wall gave way with a thunderous explosion of wood, plaster and concrete. A girl with violet colored hair stood in the hole, her left leg extended. In her small hands, she held two massive _bonbori_, far larger and heavier than normal. Ornate and stylized armor, obviously of Chinese design and motif, covered her torso. Her maces, too, were adorned and colorful, more like something in a festival than half-ton weapons of death. Only when Ranma uttered her name did Ryouga learn it.

She was Shampoo, from a tribe of fierce Chinese Amazons, the _Joketsuzoku_.

MORE

Shampoo was too good. Better than Akane. What was she thinking, fighting with her over… over… Ranma of all things? Didn't she hate him? Didn't she fight with him all the time? How could she like…

NO

He never saw the exact technique used, after Shampoo's feet hit his face, but he had seen her movements. She had attacked Ranma on a few occasions, and he had watched the way she moved in the dojo. She was reasonably skilled, and her strength was greater than that of any girl he had ever seen. Her defense, however, was weak. Even after she left, he had the feeling that this particular incident was not the last he, or Ranma, would have involving the _Joketsuzoku_.

YES

MORE

Ryouga tried to make sense of the old ghoul of a woman. How could she possibly help him train? Her proportions hardly even seemed human!

MORE

He couldn't believe it! Ranma had manhandled him, humiliated him! How had this happened?

MORE

Offering Training again, was she? _Bakusai Tenketsu_? There was definitely more to this old woman than he had first thought. It was a mistake he would not make again. Cologne – _Khu Lon_ – was her name: another of these strange Chinese Amazons. This time, he would see what she had to offer.

MORE

The rock shattered like broken glass. Ryouga laughed as the shards bounced off his toughened body. The old Amazon had done as promised! The technique didn't work on people, but that hardly mattered now. He was all but invincible! Soon, he would crush Ranma and finally be able to tell Akane his true feelings!

MORE

Ukyou wasn't a bad fighter, his reflexes were pretty good but he was far too slow. Far too slow. He broke through the cloud of dist with his umbrella. A downward jab, followed by a sweeping slash, would send this upstart new ally of Saotome's flying.

MORE

Mousse unleashed a wave of chains and blades. His technique was…

MORE

Kuno's sword skills were…

MORE

Old man Saotome was…

MORE

Pantyhose Taro

MORE

Miss Hinako

MORE

MORE

MORE

With a gasp, Ryouga's eyes shot open. In the harsh light, he saw a face with no eyes, hollow cavities and a mind of hate and power, devouring his thoughts and memories. Stripping and searching through everything that made him … him. Strong hands, five fingered hands, held him down as he struggled and screamed. In one horrible instant, in one unrelenting nightmare tide, it all came back.

He remembered it all.

He felt pressure points being pressed, and his body railed against them. It was still in shock. Still reliving what he had been forced to see. It wanted to lash out. He heard himself shout one last flurry of obscenities and curses, and then with a sharp intake of air, he fell back against the bed.

He remembered it all.

Why? Why had they forced him to sleep? Why had they forced him to remember? The distant voices were human. He recognized them, but he didn't hear them.

Oh gods…

'Akari… oh Akari…'

He remembered it all.

Worse: he understood, now, why they had let him live.

WHERE

* * *


	2. Address Unknown Part II

"What the hell happened ta him, doc?"

Dr. Tofu Ono shook his head, and let out a relieved sigh. "I don't know. He seems healthy."

Looking down at his patient, Tofu's brows came together forming a grimace behind his glasses. On the table, Ryouga Hibiki had been firmly restrained once more, this time with several loops of steel chains around his wrists and ankles. It wasn't something Tofu liked, but with all the thrashing about, it was for everyone's safety. The young man, who Tofu had treated on occasion for the last two years, seemed the picture of health.

But something was wrong.

Narrowing his eyes, Tofu could feel the restlessness in the man's _ki_. He was angry, and desperate and afraid, but of what the older man couldn't imagine. Luckily, the _ki_ was internalized, and couldn't manifest into a potentially devastating aura or attack without a conscious mind guiding it. Ono was tempted to think that the problem was just some sort of deep reoccurring nightmare. When Ranma had first brought Ryouga in, there had been signs of sleep depravation and protracted insomnia.

His body needed rest, regardless.

"Aaaa!" Tofu made a pained grunt and cradled his right hand in his left, massaging it gently. He had never hurt his fingers using that pressure point on someone before. Not only had he needed to activate the point through Ryouga's inhuman constitution, but through local _ki _barriers as well. Everyone had them, and it normally wasn't a problem, but Ryouga (like Ranma and some of the other locals) had unusually strong _ki_. Had he been emitting an active aura, most pressure points would've been blocked entirely. Only someone like Cologne or Happosai would be able to use acupressure on someone with an aura like the two boys produced.

"Well," Tofu adjusted his glasses. "He'll be out until tomorrow morning, at least. You can ask him then. Hopefully, he'll have calmed down somewhat."

"Thanks. Give us a call when he does, ok?" Ranma asked, and Tofu nodded. The pigtailed martial artist spared his rival a worried glare before taking his leave. Outside the clinic, he spotted Akane waiting, leaning against the wall.

"Will he be ok?" she quickly asked, her concern annoying her fiancée slightly. "I heard so much yelling, I…"

"He'll be fine. The jerk just needs some sleep, is all," Ranma said, and started walking back to the Tendo Dojo. Akane had run out of the clinic earlier, not wanting to see her 'good friend Ryouga' in such a state. Truth be told, Ranma couldn't blame her. It was unnerving to see him that way. Sure Ryouga getting beaten up tended to herald some new challenger or danger, like Taro or the Musk, but this was different. This wasn't something that involved martial arts, as far as Ranma could tell, and so it was almost totally out of his element.

The two walked in silence, as the sky grew darker above them.

"I hope Akari's ok," Akane finally said out loud. That was something they could both agree on, at least. Akari Unryu was a nice girl, and a friend. Not a close or great friend, but still… given that he didn't have many real friends, Ranma still supposed she was one of them. He had helped her get Ryouga, after all, though that had been as much for the benefit of weaning the lost boy off Akane as it had been for Akari's sake.

Ryouga had yelled out her name several times before, but calls to her house had all caught the answering machine. This was hardly unusual. Akari had her farm to take care of, and even on normal days most callers either ended up with the machine or her grandfather – the former being the more reliable of the two, given the old man's spotty memory. Ranma was surprised that she didn't have a cellular phone that they could try. Hell, even Ryouga had a cell phone, though he (more than maybe anyone else) really needed one.

The lost boy could even be a poster child for a wireless network, wandering around and asking, "Can you hear me now?" Ranma shook his head. That was even sillier than usual.

He and Akane walked in silence for a few more seconds. The whole situation with Ryouga had put a real damper on everyone's mood. Things had been relatively quiet for a while now, since the disaster that had been the last Tendo New Year's Party. Ukyou (currently off somewhere with her okonomiyaki cart leaving the store to Konatsu) was prepping for college and playing the waiting game to see what her Ran-chan would do after graduation, Kodachi was off visiting a university in Europe, and Kuno (much to everyone's joy) was struggling through the University of Kyoto, trying to get a degree in Business Management. Only the China gang were still around to cause problems.

Amazons were certainly tenacious, that was for sure.

And, of course, Ryouga had either been wandering or spending his time with Akari. He dropped by every now and then to get into a scrap or have a spar (sometimes Mousse would jump in too), hang out and talk about techniques, and it was essentially an arrangement Ranma really liked. All it had taken was two years of insanity, a series of unusual coincidences, and a little luck. Then the martial artist formerly known as P-chan just had to show up, seemingly exhausted and half dead, collapsed just outside the Tendo's front gate. No doubt his arrival heralded some new wave of crazy Chinese Princes, Amazons, and fiancées.

He sighed.

"So, Akane," Ranma began, licked his lips, and continued a little nervously. "You going to _juku_ tomorrow, or what?"

She looked at him with a mixture of surprise and hopefulness, before blushing and looking in the other direction. "Probably. Maybe."

"I was, uh… thinkin' … maybe that, if yer not goin,' we could get somethin' ta eat. And see a movie, like around five?" He looked around, expecting an assault bicycle to interrupt at any second, Shampoo at the helm.

"When you say something to eat… I assume you don't mean _Ucchan's_ or the _Nekohanten_?" Akane asked, looking at him out of the corner of her eyes.

"No no no!" Ranma had learned his lesson about that. He smiled in what he hoped was a charming way, and waved his hands placatingly. "There's that new East-West Fusion restaurant, Dai Francisco… How does that sound?"

Akane smiled. "Well, I do feel a little bad about skipping classes…"

"They shouldn't schedule 'em so late," Ranma replied with a huff. "I don't know why you even bother. We… I mean you've still got the Dojo. Ya don't need any fancy university degree ta teach solid Martial Arts."

Akane frowned, then her features softened again. "I … I know. But in case that doesn't work out, it's a good idea to have some sort of fallback option. Like regular teaching."

Ranma scratched the base of his pigtail, feeling a little guilty for not even trying to get a degree. He knew it didn't really reflect that well on the school, or on the dojo (not to say that he was seriously thinking of actually inheriting it or marrying anyone), to have a sensei without any higher education. But was that really so bad? He was a superb martial artist – one of the best, in fact! He'd attract students by virtue of his skill alone.

There was nothing worthwhile for colleges and the like to teach him anyway.

"I guess." He smirked, feeling good about the direction of the conversation. "Anything's better than risking a loan from Nabiki."

Akane laughed, nodding. Even after being admitted to Meiji University, where she was determined to either pursue a career in Law or Economics, Nabiki hadn't stopped being her typical mercenary self. If anything, she had gotten worse, without any reliable income from scamming Kuno or the rest of her family and friends.

As they talked, Ranma couldn't help but smile to himself in triumph. Not one slip up, not one malleting, not one fist-to-the-face, nothing! It was almost normal! He had to admit: when she wasn't blowing what he said out of proportion, or taking things the wrong way, or jumping to unreasonable conclusions, or being a violent tomboy, or coddling one of his enemies/rivals, she wasn't that bad to be around. As they neared the Tendo Dojo, the two realized that they were walking close together, and quickly distanced themselves. Their eyes met, and they both silently agreed: there was really no need to let anyone else know what they had planned for tomorrow.

Above the two, and above the Tendo Dojo specifically, the stars twinkled.

* * *

Nabiki was the first to realize something was wrong.

It was just past midnight, when she saw something strange. Looking up from her calculus book, to the laptop on her desk, she blinked a few times, unwilling to admit what she had seen. Then, sure enough, it happened again. On the screen of her expensive new computer, a window opened and closed. Then another.

"What on earth…?" She put aside her book, rubbed her sleepy brown eyes, and watched mutely as more and more windows opened and closed, until they went by too fast to see. Nabiki was no computer scientist, or programmer, but she knew this wasn't normal. The tried to move the mouse, but it was stuck.

Her first worry was that it had something to do with all the illegal downloads (and files) she had on her computer. And there were a LOT. Only a second later did it occur to her that it might have been a virus, worm, Trojan, or whatever… in which case she had no idea what to do. She had anti-virus running, and could see the icon in the taskbar, but it certainly didn't seem to be helping. Something was screwing with the system. The obvious solution was also the least subtle, but it was what came to her first.

She pulled the plug, and tried the power button.

The plug came out without complication, but the internal battery wasn't easily removable, and pressing the power button wasn't having the desired effect. It just wasn't turning off. She pressed it hard, and then she pressed it rapidly. Neither worked. Cursing didn't seem to be helping either. She then tried ctrl-alt-del. Nothing. The Task Manager was AWOL.

The processor fan was whirring.

Whatever was happening to the laptop was obviously using up a lot of processor power. Nabiki could only watch, stunned, as things spiraled out of her control. Ten seconds later, the screen went dark, as if the sleek, expensive new jet-black computer, its job now done, suddenly and dramatically decided to commit _seppuku._

'My movies… my mp3s… my photos… my reports!' Nabiki silently grieved. 'Oh no! My English Paper! My economics report!'

And then, her desk lamp went dead.

'My…' Nabiki paused, and felt a sudden chill. 'What's happening? What's going on?'

Slowly, she eased out of her chair, and carefully felt her way through the darkness to her window. The curtains and the blackout had conspired to throw her into a sea of night, turning the familiar contours and shapes of her room into a crisscross of shadows and shades. Nabiki reached for her curtains, and was about to pull them back when she saw a light – brighter and sharper than any streetlight or headlight.

More afraid than she would have cared to admit, she pulled the curtains back and to the side, and fell back nearly blinded. Reaching out as she fell, she knocked over her chair, and it fell to the floor with a clamor of hard plastic on wood. Scrambling backwards, away from the light that now engulfed her room, she bumped up against her door. The light pulsed, like a living thing, and moved from the bottom of the window up and out of view.

Heart racing, Nabiki Tendo reached up, and quickly locked the door behind her.

Already, her body had began to feel numb. The light had been warm at first, but when it left, she felt cold and her skin clammy. Even after the light was gone, somewhere on the roof or above the house, she had trouble moving or thinking. A part of her hoped, prayed, that it was a helicopter, one of the new ones that were very quiet.

And another part of her knew better.

Behind her, she felt the door start to tremble, and heard the lock unlock with a metallic click...

* * *

The Matriarch of the _Joketsuzoku_ awoke instantly.

Reaching up to her forehead, she felt a cold sweat trickle down her wrinkled brow. Crossing her arms and her legs, she closed her eyes; she extended her mind and _ki_. She went beyond the walls of the _Nekohanten_, beyond the flickering or dead streetlights, towards the Tendo Dojo. She could not pinpoint the problem, but she could sense the wrongness.

The abomination.

It was like a slick of oil in the water that was the natural flow of _ki_ on earth. Her mind raced, through legends as old as the Bronze Age, up to hushed whispers and storied rumors in this Age of Information. It was something beyond her actual experience. Something she had never given more than a passing thought to. The implications horrified her as noting before ever had.

Grabbing her walking stick, the shriveled old woman moved with surprising speed and purpose. Shampoo was the closest. Cologne entered her room like a shadow, and saw her tossing and turning in her sleep. The old woman looked at her closely, and once again marveled at how much her great granddaughter resembled her. At eighteen, the resemblance was even keener. She had gotten taller, like a proper Amazon, much as Cologne herself had so many years ago.

She was still so young, with so much to look forward to.

"Shampoo!" Cologne hit her on the rump with her walking stick, and the younger Amazon jumped out of her futon with a surprised yelp. It wasn't the nicest way to wake up her heir, but it was the most expedient.

"Quiet," Cologne commanded. "Come."

* * *

Ranma was a sounder sleeper than his father.

It was a weakness Genma had never quite managed to weed out of his son. It was little surprise, then, that Ranma remained sound asleep while Genma's eyes opened and narrowed. His ears twitched, as the electric hum that had interrupted his slumber sent a chill down his spine. He could feel it in his bones. Something was wrong.

Very wrong.

His sensitive ears heard the door slide open. Filled with an unexplainable unease in the put of his stomach, he slowly turned his head and rolled onto his back. There was a glow beyond the slowly opening door that belonged to no hall lamp or light. Genma Saotome's eyes widened, as a small, slender, childlike hand, the fingers half again too long, became highlighted against the light.

He nudged the sleeping body next to him.

The door opened fully, and Genma saw two of them: bulbous child sized bodies with thin arms and legs, the former long the latter squat and shrunken. The faces on their oversized heads weren't human. The eyes were too large, and dark, and the rest was nearly featureless. They had no nose and only tiny thin mouths. Each carried some sort of… weapon in their right hands. It was large, and vaguely misshapen, but obviously some sort of ranged weapon. They also each seemed to be carrying something dark above one hip.

Genma reached for his 'I'm just a cuddly panda' sign.

But…

Involuntarily, he growled. It was really the only sound besides 'gworf' that he could make at the moment. The two creatures looked at him. Or maybe they didn't. It was hard for Genma to tell. He kept nudging Ranma with his right foot/paw, hoping the boy would wake up. Instead, the younger Saotome just grumbled something, and rolled into a ball, taking the rest of the blanket they shared.

Genma could've sign-slammed him.

The creatures briefly exchanged looks, apparently surprised to see him. Or, more accurately, surprised to see a panda. Genma gulped. One trained its weapon on him, while the other pulled out another gun, smaller, like a handgun. It was a dull green and gray. He doubted they would fall for the loveable-panda-and-his-tire trick, so Genma inched towards the window.

'Forgive me, son!' Genma spared his son another look. Ranma was snoring, blissfully unaware of anything. The creature took aim, and with a crash of skin and fur and broken glass, Genma jumped. He escaped a split second before a bolt of green plasma hit the wall. The bolt burned halfway into the wall before dispersing, and instantly turning half the wall to ash. The air temperature raised a handful of degrees.

Ranma opened his eyes, and saw the two visitors standing in the doorway.

He paused, shock and disbelief causing potentially fatal indecision. Was he still dreaming? A second later, he winced as a screaming voice cut into his mind. He held his head in his hands as it rose in volume, louder and louder. His body began to feel numb, but he fought against it, and tried to get to his feet. One of the intruders fired their larger weapon, though Ranma never heard the sound.

A purple mist filled the room.

Remembering his experience with Kodachi and her fascination with paralysis powder, he held his breath. Not that it mattered. He felt a distant tingle, as the chemicals entered his body though his pores. It worked instantly. Then came a moment of freezing cold and blinding pain, his back arching, and then his vision plunged into darkness.

* * *

Cologne found Mousse in the same state as Shampoo. The Chinese boy's hair was a matted mess, and his futon looked like he's just slept in it… with someone else. Watching him reach for his thick glasses and fumble before putting them on his face, Cologne shook her head. It was hard to believe that he was the best warrior the male population of their village had yet to produce.

Not that they were encouraged to be warriors in the first place.

The Master of Hidden Weapons adjusted his glasses, and frowned. "Cologne? What's going on here?"

"That's a potted plant." Cologne smacked him upside the head with her stick. He looked in the right direction, saw Shampoo, and was about to speak when Cologne cut him off. "Be silent and follow me."

He stood, checked to make sure his boxer shorts were on, and followed.

"Stupid Mousse," Shampoo added, whispering.

He seemed about to respond, no doubt in a pleading manner, but thought better of it. It wasn't the first time Shampoo had said as much of him, and it wouldn't be the last, but anyone seeing Mousse's face in the dark could've seen that it hurt him nonetheless. Cologne led the two quickly to the basement door of the _Nekohanten_. It normally served as storage for the restaurant, and the door was thick and heavy, the hinges fat and iron. Shampoo reached for the dangling cord that would turn on the lights, but Cologne softly batted her hand away with her stick.

"Don't," was all the old Amazon said.

Mousse and Shampoo followed in the dark, not really needing the light to feel their way down the steps. At the bottom, it was dark enough that their companions were only vague shapes. Shampoo idly figured that it was probably how Mousse saw the world most of the time.

"You both know where the faucet is," Cologne said, her voice tense. "Use it. Hide. Stay in your cursed forms. Do not leave here for at least half a day. At least until morning. Is that clear?"

Both youths nodded.

"Yes, Great grandmother," Shampoo said, quietly.

Cologne paused to look at the two of them. "Good."

And then the _Joketsuzoku_ Matriarch moved swiftly up the steps and closed the door behind her. With a tap of her walking stick, she walked towards the restaurant entrance, waiting. For a few minutes, she held out the hope that she was wrong. The problem was that, at her age, she so seldom was.

Sure enough, the sick feeling returned.

Closer, now.

Closer.

Lights descended, suspended outside, eerie like will o' wisps. To her left and right, she saw shapes move, gangly but faster than expected. The digital clock above the stove was off, but the mechanical one in the likeness of a beckoning cat, that Shampoo had perched in the dining area, was still moving. She felt their minds, at least three, distinct but frighteningly inhuman. She gritted her teeth, trying to understand the nature of the attack and develop a countermeasure.

Her mental discipline held.

Her body alternated between numbness and pain, but she stood. She could almost see the course of the attacks, like perversions of _ki_ energy, as they buffeted her. Adjusting her perspective made it easier to fortify her mind and her senses. After a few seconds, the invading minds switched tactics, bombarding her with irrational fears and mad thoughts. Still, she stood, the staff in her hands trembling like a leaf.

Ahead of her, the door to the restaurant unlocked itself, and slowly opened.

A single tall figure stood out against the demonic glow outside. Even in the dark, the strange robes it wore shone with an unearthly luminescence. She readied a _ki _attack, building her energy, and dividing her concentration between that task and her mental defenses. As it came closer, floated closer, making no footsteps, Cologne began to see its face.

It was a shriveled, desiccated, face.

YES

Like that of a corpse, risen from the grave.

YOU

In the blackened hollow pits where there may once have been eyes, something glowed, and the room shook and erupted into flame. In the stone bunker of the basement, hidden behind a number of heavy preserving jars, a small white and lavender cat and a cream colored duck heard Cologne's battle cry. It was not a voice either had ever heard, nor one they would ever forget.


	3. Address Unknown Part III

MORE

Akari's brown eyes were wide and pleading, tears falling down her cheeks. Where were they? He was being held upright, but she was on her back… a table of some sort. What was happening? The creatures moved around, making that awful noise of theirs, like insects chewing on leaves, but one stood still. Why was this happening? Ryouga couldn't see the face, but he could feel its mind, slowly boring into his own. It was a Martial Artist's duty to protect the weak! It already had a measure of control – he couldn't move, not to save his own life. Not even to save hers. Akari!

MORE

Ryouga struggled, still. It had his body subdued, but his mental barriers were still up, just as they had been most of his life. He repeated mantras that helped focus his _ki_. There was still the chance that, if he was subtle enough about it, he could get off a _shishihokodan_ and free himself. The other mind invaded him, feeling out his defenses, looking for a means to force entry.

It found it.

Surface memories were the first to be taken. Then more personal ones. Ryouga struggled, but could do little to defend himself as the dispassionate alien intelligence raped his mind, tearing through all that made him, him. Drool ran down his chin, and mixed with the blood that trickled from his nose. It was after something specific. It pressed to reveal more that it desired, it wanted stronger memories, stronger thoughts. Martial Arts. _Ki_. It wanted to know more. More. More MORE

Ryouga felt it leave him.

He could still hear its lingering thoughts, cold and callous and alien. It seemed pleased, and almost eager. One of the smaller creatures, not hidden behind a strange robe like their leader, motioned towards the other human. He heard one word, one thought, before the leading creature drifted away.

HARVEST

On the table, he clearly heard Akari whimper.

Unable to blink, unable to turn away, he saw it all; remembered it all.

* * *

Ryouga awoke, his face wet with tears and sweat, and a scream almost past his lips. It was dark, but there were no shadows moving over him – no shriveled face with hollow eyes looming like death himself. There were only a few medical instruments, humming and beeping in time with his heart.

"Where the hell am I now?" he asked, his voice strained and his throat hoarse.

Raising his head, his chin touching his collar, he saw the heavy chains attached to his wrists and ankles. Slowly, he recognized the room. Not that there were many hospitals that used chains to hold someone down, anyway. So he was in Tofu's Clinic? That was just fine. He'd been lost for two days in a large city hospital before, and wasn't keen on a repeat performance.

Ryouga flexed his hands and arms, and tried to get a feel for the chains.

They were tough: probably steel. Most likely, they were some of Mousse's old chains, which occasionally ended up strewn around town when Ranma and the blind boy fought. He had three loops around each wrist to deal with. He felt far from top condition, but was semi-confident he could break them if he had to. Then, a better idea came to him. He felt out with his _ki_, and examined the metal for a breaking point, at the same time taking in its structure and composition, the degree of alloy and the type…

"There!" he exclaimed, but kept his voice down. Channeling power down his right arm, he stopped it around his wrist, before it could accumulate in his finger or fist. Releasing the _ki_, it rushed out to his skin, and then into the metal. Instantly, the chains snapped and crumpled like old dry paper. He quickly repeated the procedure for his other arm, and then reached down and destroyed the chains around his ankles.

Rolling off the table and onto his feet, he paused.

Part of him wanted to run: to run, find something and kill it. But he had to warn the others. If he was right, then all Nerima's martial artists were in danger, and he was directly at fault. The Kunos were out of town he knew, so that left the group at the Tendo Dojo, at the _Nekohanten_, and at _Ucchans_. There were other Dojos and the like in the area that Ryouga had heard of, but he didn't have the foggiest idea where they were. Which meant, hopefully, that the aliens didn't either.

He looked up and around.

No lights. That was hardly a definitive proof that none of the invaders were nearby, but it was something at least. He pulled the electrodes from his chest, and heard the heart monitor loudly flat-line. A second later, he heard a noise upstairs, and knew it was Doc Tofu. Ryouga waited, and put on his shirt and tunic. Sure enough, a man in his twenties with brown hair entered the room in a rush, probably expecting some sort of medical emergency.

"Ryouga?" he asked, and saw that the lost boy seemed calm enough to talk to instead of needing restraint. "What happened?"

"Fucking aliens." The other man responded with a growl, using the almost universally understood English profanity. He could see that his answer was not what Tofu had expected, so he elaborated. "They're after Martial Artists. Probably followed me here."

"What? Wait. Aliens?" Tofu's voice was reasonable enough, but Ryouga could easily read the expression on his face.

"And you'd've have believed me if I said demons? Or evil spirits? Or half-men half-animals from China?"

Tofu seemed to consider that. "I see your point, but…"

"No offense, Doc, but I've got to go. I can get to the Tendo Dojo from here, roof hopping, but someone has to warn Ukyou and the Amazons."

"About those, ah… aliens?" Tofu sounded skeptical again.

Ryouga turned to go, but hesitated.

"They killed her," he said, his voice hard and angry. "They killed her… I'm not gonna let any more innocent people die. Not if I can help it!"

After opening the wrong door, the lost boy found his way out of the small clinic, and jumped up onto the roof. Tofu stood motionless. Walking out, he watched as Ryouga jumped to the next roof, and then the next, heading towards… towards a bright light, around where the Tendo Dojo was. The doctor shivered, and not because of the cold night air. Behind him and to the west, he heard something explode with a distant rumble.

Only half convinced that he wasn't going mad, he started to run.

_Uuchan's Okonomiyaki_ wasn't more than five minutes away.

* * *

Ryouga could see his target.

He blinked, and remembered seeing a similar strange light hovering ominously over the Unryu Farm. He remembered wandering back there, by pure chance, and finding it empty, the doors and windows covered by police tape. All the animals were gone. It was like a ghost house.

He blinked and remembered being lost in the woods, trying to get to the only other place he considered home: the Tendo Dojo. He had been tired and exhausted, and when he looked over his shoulder, he saw a bright light, just above tree level, following him. And then, perhaps sensing his hesitation, it came closer. He had tried to run, to escape, but to no avail.

He wasn't running away this time.

Keeping to the shadows, he concentrated on not getting lost. Fortunately, roof hopping was a lot more straightforward than making his way through winding, unmarked and unnamed Tokyo streets. With a target in sight, he was sure that he'd avoid getting turned around. It was how he had made it to the Tendo Dojo in record time after that first _shishi hokodan_ duel with Ranma. He'd used it several times since then, and had never regretted the decision. Coping with (and brooding over) his directional problems was second nature, by this point in life.

Creeping over the roof of one of the taller buildings, he stole a look out towards the Dojo. He could see part of it, now. Not the Dojo, but the ship. It looked like it was settled between the koi pond, and the next-door neighbor's house. It was two stories in height, as large as the Tendo house at least, and oddly serrated, with jagged corners. The outer stonewall that Tendo-san always had to repair had been nearly demolished by the landing, but at least the Dojo and main building were intact.

Good.

That meant, at least, that no one had been killed yet. Probably. Ryouga frowned, and narrowed his eyes at the small shapes near the end of the ship facing the Tendo porch. His night vision was good (good enough to fight with), and from his hidden perch, the lost boy counted just over a half dozen of the little devils. One of them dragged a larger body (whose, Ryouga couldn't say) to the ship, where a door slid open.

The lost boy was contemplating a plan of action, when he felt a rising _ki_.

Looking back, behind him, he felt it more acutely: rippling waves of energy in the flow of the earth. It was strong too, which meant one thing. Cologne. The same ancient Amazon who had taught Ryouga the _bakusai tenketsu,_ and who had given Ranma the _katshu tenshin amaguriken_ and _hiryu shoten ha_, was herself fighting these creatures. Even after Ranma and Ryouga had gotten stronger, and incorporated other special techniques into their styles, Cologne had remained stronger than either of them.

He wished her luck.

The assembled aliens seemed to tense up, before five started running. Ryouga could only assume they were headed for the _Nekohanten_, where Cologne was putting up unexpected resistance. He hunkered down, and watched them go, careful to keep out of sight. He remembered how they had caught him twice before, how he had hesitated after first coming face to face with one of them. A second later had come the mental attack.

Ryouga balled his fists. He wasn't about to make the same mistake a third time. There was only one of the little monsters left, guarding the front of the ship. Or what Ryouga assumed to be the front. Who really knew? He mentally cursed as he moved, wishing that Ranma was around.

'Not that I like his company, but the _umisenken_ would be pretty damn handy right about now,' Ryouga thought, bitterly. From what Nabiki had told him about that fight, and what little he had gotten out of Ranma, he couldn't help but feel a little envious of those who had been around to see those techniques in action. Still, he would make due with what he had on hand. He reached up to his forehead and pulled down one of his bandannas. Then, he reconsidered, and took a second one, too. The time for half measures, holding back, and mercy toward weaker opponents was over.

It had ended when they killed the woman he loved.

Jumping from the roof, Ryouga spun the two bandannas in his right hand. He didn't issue a battle cry, or any other 'honorable warning.' The alien turned its bulbous head at the same time Ryouga snapped his hand out and released the cloth projectiles, stiffened and made razor sharp courtesy of the Hibiki iron cloth technique. It had time to raise its weapon, but not to fire, as the two bladed bandannas flashed by, embedding themselves in the ground behind the creature.

Ryouga landed in a crouch, and slowly reached for his belt sword.

A few feet away, the Sectoid let out a high-pitched, blood-chilling groan (that sounded too much like a screaming child), as its right arm slid out of its socket, falling to the ground with a wet splatter. Green and purple puss flooded out of the cleanly cut wound, bubbling and foaming. A second later, it fell to its knees, leaned forward, and the top of its head slid off. Thick pink ooze spilled out onto the grass, and with a convulsive shudder the alien collapsed into a boneless heap.

Ryouga's hand slowly left his belt.

"So, you can be killed," he said, softly, and stood over the body. Then, he smiled, overlarge canines on prominent display. "Good. Because I intend to kill every last one of you for what you did. Every last one."

To his side, the alien ship waited.

He could see it clearly now, the slight indentation where the door was. He had expected the humming sound to be louder, but it seemed the same no matter how far you were from it. Was it possible that the sound was all in his mind? He found that he didn't care. The dull gray alien metal was cool to the touch, but not cold, and the texture was incredibly smooth, like silk. It was strong, however: stronger than any material Ryouga had ever encountered, even dragonscale.

Narrowing his eyes, he searched for a breaking point.

And found none.

Which was impossible, he told himself. He tried again, and found nothing. What that meant, he had no idea. All inanimate materials had breaking points, and he was far enough along in his martial arts construction techniques to not just see breaking points, but to evaluate material composition as well. He couldn't with this. It was like looking through thick stained glass, and seeing only an indistinct silhouette.

He felt around, trying to find a way to make it open. There didn't seem to be a button or switch to press. He placed his hand directly on the door itself, thought it felt no different then the rest of the hull. He pushed, at first just a little, and then harder. Nothing. Then, he pulled back his hand, and with a hiss, the door slid down and away, out of sight.

He stepped inside.

A few seconds later, the door closed behind him. The room was small, maybe large enough for nine good-sized people to stand, cramped, shoulder-to-shoulder, three by three. There was another door ahead, different looking. Unlike the outer door, which had been slightly convex to match the hull, this one was flat, and had a strange symbol on it. There also seemed to be a faintly glowing panel set into the wall nearby.

Ryouga silently prayed the door wasn't locked.

From what he had been able to determine, he could neither break through it nor blast through it. If the door was locked, he was (as the Americans said) "well and truly fucked." He couldn't even hear or see what was on the other side. Cracking his knuckles, he pressed his palm to the door. Nothing. He nodded, expecting that. Tensing his body, he pulled back his hand, and the door quickly slid open.

Two large oval eyes stared at him.

Ryouga acted without hesitation. The alien's hand passed by its sidearm, and reached for the larger weapon on a nearby table. It was a foolish mistake. Ryouga lashed out with his belt sword, and with a flash, severed the limb. The alien howled, but was otherwise seemingly undeterred by the mortal wound. Desperately it seized the weapon with its other hand, spun with remarkable quickness, and took aim. Why it was so obsessed with that particular weapon the lost boy didn't know.

He hit the front of it with his palm, and force sending the butt of the rifle into the alien's left shoulder, before the alien's back hit the wall. It wailed as the bones there broke, and it lost its grip on the alien rifle. Ryouga cursed to himself, knowing he was taking too long. His next strike with the sword was fatal, and it cleanly removed the Sectoid's head from its neck. The bloody body slumped against the wall, and fell back, leaving a trail of foul smelling brackish blood behind, like spilled paint.

Pausing only to catch his breath, Ryouga saw the table in the center of the room.

* * *

Tears streamed down her face, mixing with blood…

* * *

He shook his head, forcing back the memories. It wasn't something he wanted to remember. It wasn't something he wanted to see every time he closed his eyes and fell into a nightmare-wracked sleep. He looked at the headless alien corpse, and kicked it swiftly in the gut, sending a new fountain of gore out of the neck.

"Bastards…" he hissed. "Bastards!"

He opened the next door, and barely avoided something fast and round. It whizzed by his head and over his shoulder. Reacting purely on instinct, and the firm belief that the best response to an attack was to immediately pummel one's opponent into a fine paste, he jumped in the direction the shot had been fired. The inside of the ship here seemed darker, because there was more open space. Still, the ambient orange light from several nearby cylinders helped mitigate that disadvantage. In the long deep shadows cast around this part of the ship, Ryouga could see his foe.

The alien seemed to be reloading its weapon or something.

It didn't even bother to reach for its sidearm.

Ryouga didn't waste time pondering his good fortune, or the curious nature of the strange alien weapon. He hit low, tackling the smaller creature. In a heartbeat, he head butted the creature, stunning it, and placed his fist over its small throat. With his other hand, he slammed his palm down on his fist, driving it into the alien's neck. Ryouga heard the snapping of bones. On a human, the move would have collapsed the windpipe, and shattered the spine somewhere between the third and sixth cervical vertebrae. Here, he wasn't about to take chances.

He slammed his fist into its face, and purple blood sprayed from the creature's nose and mouth. Ryouga hit again and again, temple strikes. Mortal blows designed to cause irreparable brain damage. He heard the skull crack, and saw one of the eyes burst, leaking white fluid. Standing up, he stomped in the rib cage, just to be sure.

Breathing heavily, not from exertion, but from rage, he looked around for any other hidden enemies. Picking a direction, he continued forward, to the right end of the ship. He also got a better look at the cylinders set into the walls. They glowed faintly orange, and about half had people floating in them. None he recognized, except for the old woman who splashed people.

'The Tendos' neighbors. Not even Martial Artists. Just regular people,' he thought. 'Or at least as normal as it gets in Nerima.'

Each cylinder seemed to have a small series of controls set into the side and at the base. Ryouga ignored them for now, preferring to concentrate on checking the area. Around the bend, he saw something strange. It was a bright orange cylinder, relatively narrow, and it pulsed up and down like a piston. There seemed to be some greenish colored panels nearby, all set into the walls.

Regardless of what it was, he knew a dead end when he saw one.

Just like him to pick a direction by chance, and have it be the wrong one. Turning back, he stopped at one of the trapped people. There seemed to be a release lever of some sort on the right, near the wall. He picked the closest one, with a tall man in it, and squeezed what he assumed would allow him to open the tube. Nothing happened. Ryouga looked down at the panel, and saw that it had some strange squiggly script highlighted by a red background. On that same panel, it had a detailed diagram of the person's body, and strange script pointing to different parts. Data scrolled by at a mind boggling pace.

Already unsure, he let it be.

Continuing, he saw more and more cylinders. Most of them, as he headed towards the other side of the ship, seemed to be empty: no bodies, and no fluid for them to float in. Curious, he tried to open one with the handle from before. He squeezed gently, and it opened, the clear plastic (or something) front of the tube detaching, and sliding down into the floor. Ryouga grinned a bit. At least he had been right about how to open the things, when they weren't locked anyway.

After a half dozen empty cylinders, he saw a familiar face.

"Nabiki…" He said, and then he involuntarily looked down and blushed. She was naked, floating in the orange soup. Next to her, Kasumi and Akane also floated, eyes closed. Then their father, Soun. After an empty tube ('Genma's?' Ryouga speculated), Ranma floated in his. Oddly, he was in his male form. Either the liquid was not cold enough to trigger his curse, or it wasn't something that affected the curse at all. Ryouga looked down to the end of the curving hall. Like with the other side, it was a dead end, but here there was some sort of lift. It glowed faintly, but didn't seem large enough for one than one person to use it at a time.

Ryouga sighed, and looked back at Ranma. He didn't like turning his back on a potential avenue of attack, but he also didn't like the prospect of trying his luck the rest of the way without help. Facing Ranma's high tech prison cell, Ryouga looked down at the panel off to its side. It looked similar to before, except that there looked to be some different scribbles on an orange background instead of red. Ranma's body was also diagrammed, but there weren't any things pointing at different parts.

Ryouga examined the glass… or crystal, or plastic, or whatever.

No breaking points.

"Well, here goes…" he reached out, grasped the handle, and squeezed. The cylinder hissed, and the liquid quickly drained, sucked away in a matter of seconds. The front then slid open, and Ranma fell forward into Ryouga's arms, coughing.

"Ranma. Hey, Ranma." Ryouga gave his rival a not-so-gentle shake. "Ranma!"

With a vomiting sound, Ranma retched up several mouthfuls of the orange slime. He covered his mouth, probably in shock and disgust, and finished vacating his lungs. The pigtailed martial artist grabbed the material of Ryouga's tunic for support, and slowly opened his eyes.

"Oh, man… what the… aw, geez…!" He looked at his slime-covered left hand, mouth moving but making no words. He saw Ryouga, but still said nothing, instead looking around at the metallic gray walls and eerily glowing containment tubes.

"Where the hell…"

"Am I now?" Ryouga finished. Ranma pushed off him, and managed to stand on his own. He spat some remaining goo out of his mouth, and tried to shake the rest from his arms and legs.

"Ranma?" the lost boy asked, when he saw the other boy suddenly notice his nudity.

"Oh kami!" Ranma twisted, and looked behind him. "They didn't anal probe me, did they?"

Ryouga scowled. "Ranma! There's more important…"

"More important than finding out if I've been probed up the ass?" Ranma narrowed his eyes, and sighed. He took a little longer look at the Tendos than was probably proper, before facing Ryouga again. "Ok. Seriously. What the hell is going on?"

"We need to clean out this ship. Kill these things!" Ryouga then added, almost as an afterthought. "Then free the people here."

"Can't we just get them out like you did me?" Ranma asked. "Like, now?"

Ryouga shook his head. "Everyone on the other side of the ship is locked in. We can't let the ship take off when them in it."

"Damnit." Ranma grumbled. "There isn't really time to argue, I guess. Where…?"

"There." The lost boy pointed. "Some kind of lift to the upper half of the ship."

"Ok." A bit of Ranma's normal cockiness returned. "Let's do this then…"

"Wait!" Ryouga held his hand out in front of his rival. "Ranma. Don't pull your punches. Kill them quickly, or they'll screw with your head."

Ranma paused at that, considering the lost boy's words. Ryouga knew about Ranma's determination not to kill, a philosophy that even extended to many supernatural creatures. The pigtailed boy had nearly killed someone on the mountains of _Jusendo_, several months ago, and he had no intention to ever do so again. Ranma, in Ryouga's opinion, had always been somewhat soft, even on evil spirits and _oni_. Now was not the time for that kind of sentimentality.

"Let's just go," Ranma said, obviously not making any promises.

Ryouga sneered.

Exiting the lift, Ryouga was glad he had set Ranma free. There had been two of them waiting, but the unsealed _umisenken_ had helped even the odds. Both of the creatures had the larger bulkier weapons (the ones that apparently fired those purple balls) trained on the lift. Neither alien had expected to see the lift activate but come up empty. Dual _moko takabishas_ had stunned the two aliens, the _ki _attack hitting them at the same time Ranma fell out of the cloaked _umisenken _stance.

Ryouga followed the lift up, a flurry of bandannas hitting the prone aliens. Both screamed, as the razor edged projectiles mauled them, severing limbs and torsos. Ryouga smirked, but he also saw that Ranma had a disapproving look on his face. They locked eyes for a few seconds, before mutually breaking contact. Ranma looked back and forth.

The way split, following the contour of the hull, left and right.

"Well?" Ryouga asked, knowing his sense of direction was hardly the most reliable. "What do you think?"

"This way." Ranma indicated left. A few meters later, they saw that it ended in a dead end, with some writing on the walls. Getting closer, Ryouga put his hand up against an indented part of the wall, and pulled his hand back. It slid open, revealing a weapon locker. Not that either boy had any experience with firearms, much less alien ones.

Without another word, they headed back and went left.

And around.

Finally, after walking around half the inner circumference of the ship, they came to a door that obviously led to the middle portion they had been trekking around. The two martial artists looked at each other, nodded, and got ready to break in. They'd fought together before numerous times, and knew each other well enough that gestures alone could convey their plans of attack. The aliens obviously suspected they were loose, since they had set up an ambush at the lift. There was no reason not to suspect that opening this door wouldn't lead to another surprise attack.

Ranma took up the _umisenken_ stance, and gradually faded away.

'Nice little trick.' Ryouga had to admit after seeing the technique for the first time, though he kept his thoughts to himself. 'I will have to figure out how he does that.'

He heard Ranma take a few steps forward, and Ryouga ducked out of sight a few feet away. If one of those exploding purple gas balls did fly through the moment Ranma opened the door, Ryouga didn't want to be hit by collateral. Ranma's invisible hand mimicked Ryouga's, and the door slid open.

Sure enough, there was a muffled 'baff' sound, and a cloud of purple gas hit the wall behind Ranma, only missing him because of the invisibility granted by the Thousand Fists of the Sea Technique. Both martial artists hit the floor and rolled, Ryouga pushing off the wall with his right arm. The action forced Ranma out of the _umisenken_, and Ryouga saw the other boy out of the corner of his eye. In front of them were two of the creatures, one with a weapon in its hand, and the other working at some sort of computer console.

Ryouga reached for a bandanna, when suddenly a numbing pain shot into the back of his mind like a railroad spike. The alien, not even one of the horrible cloaked ones Ryouga remembered, but just one of the so called 'gray' aliens… held up its other hand, and a powerful telekinetic force hit him square in the chest, and caused his lungs to seize up. It wasn't a physical blow, like being hit by air pressure or a vacuum wave, it was like an invisible intangible hand had reached through his chest and started squeezing the air out of him.

He heard Ranma let loose another of his trademark _ki_ attacks.

"_Moko Takabisha!_" Ranma yelled, and the _ki_ ball streaked towards the closest alien - the leader. It hit square on, but paused in midair in front of the creature, as if encountering some sort of barrier. The pigtailed martial artist gasped, in disbelief, as his attack was repulsed and hit the ceiling, doing no noticeable damage to the alien metal.

"Kill it, Ranma!" Ryouga snarled, clutching his chest. "KILL IT NOW!"

With a battle cry, Ranma charged, closing the distance. The alien leader quickly threw down its larger weapon, and reached for its more deadly sidearm. It took aim a second too late, a green ball of plasma missing Ranma by mere inches, passing under his arm and left of his torso. Even still, he winced, as the near contact scorched his skin.

"_Katchu Tenshin Amaguriken_!" Ranma's right hand blurred as he struck over and over, more than two dozen times in the blink of an eye. The alien writhed, and let out a banshee wail, before flying back against the wall, its back breaking in several places to the sound of dry timber. Ranma's problems, however, were not over.

The last alien had left his seat by the console, and had another alien sidearm trained on the proud martial artist. Ranma froze, muscles coiling for another rapid evasive motion, when something fast struck with a buzzing sound. The alien's hand fell from the wrist, and an instant later, the rest fell forward in two halves, cut clean through its pale abdomen. White coils of intestine and other misshapen chunks drowned in a pool of sickening ooze, as the body twitched, groaned, and died.

Ranma blinked, and frowned a little.

He'd never seen Ryouga use his bandannas like this before. Sure, he knew they were dangerous, and he had received the occasional cut, but he'd never seen them seriously hurt anyone. The closest was when the lost boy's belt sword had cut Akane's hair short. A part of Ranma was sure that those same bandannas could have an identical impact on a human body.

It was… disconcerting.

"Six," Ryouga spoke up, his voice laced with hatred.

"Well, at least that's over with. Can we get the Hell out of here now?" He looked at Ryouga, and then past him, to the open door that they had used to enter the control room. "Oh… oh no…"

"What?" Ryouga turned, expecting another attack. What he saw was, in some way, much, much worse. Past the door, a previously closed 'window' in the hull had opened, shining some light in from outside.

Except that outside was, in this case…

An endless expanse of tiny stars against a black background, and below it: the curvature of a familiar blue and white planet. The two martial artists, just eighteen, exchanged worried looks. Then Ranma looked down at himself, and back up as his companion and long time rival.

"Hey, Ryouga."

"What?"

"I'll fight you for your clothes."

"…I don't think so."


	4. In the Sky with Diamonds Part I

The year is 2005. For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. After attacking the Unryu Farm, the Unknown Enemy followed a dumbstruck lost boy back to Nerima, Tokyo, revealing the location of a small clique of unique martial artists. Together, Ranma and Ryouga managed to overpower the depleted Sectoid crew of the Abductor that had attacked the Dojo. Now, the Tendo Clan, Ranma, and Ryouga are stranded on the alien craft, suspended far above the earth.

* * *

**The Road To Cydonia**

Chapter II  
_ In the Sky with Diamonds_

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

"Where do you suppose we are?" 

"You're asking ME?"

The earth shone like a jewel, more reflective and sparkling than the pictures of it led one to believe. Light reflected off of the water, both on the surface and in the swirling chaotically arranged clouds, giving the slowly rotating sphere far below an almost gemlike afterglow. But that was just a sliver of the whole picture. The veil between dark and light slowly crept over the endless, trackless expanse of ocean below.

When Ranma didn't respond, Ryouga tried to answer him.

"We're in space," he said, confidently.

"Gee, ya think?" Ranma quipped. "I can't believe we're lost in space. We should rename the ship the '_Jupiter 2_.'"

"Huh?" Ryouga grunted, not familiar with the name. "Wait! Are you implying this is MY fault?"

Ranma sighed. "No, you idiot. It was a movie I saw! Don't you have a TV on that farm of yours? But now that I think about it… you did kill the alien using that control panel thing. Maybe this _is_ your fault!"

Ryouga opened his mouth to defend himself, before grumbling and looking back out the window. He reached out, and ran his hand down the clear material. It wasn't glass, or plastic, but seemed to be a part of the hull itself, turned transparent. There were a few of them, along the outside of the ship, all square in shape, and a little less than a meter in to a side. Oddly, none of the 'rooms' seemed to have any 'windows.'

"Maybe… No. Not maybe. This is all my fault," Ryouga said, and watched the Pacific Ocean from a thousand miles away.

"Hey, I was just kidding, man!" Ranma slapped him on the back. "If not for you showin' up, who knows what kinda trouble we'd be in!"

Ryouga did know.

He just nodded and changed the subject. "We should go let the others out."

"Oh yeah, I can't wait." Ranma joked. "I let Akane out, she hits me for me bein' naked, and then she hits me for her bein' naked, and then for everyone 'cept you being naked, and who knows what else?"

Ryouga didn't like Ranma making fun of Akane, but he detected a certain tone of endearment in his rival's words, so he held his tongue. Besides, the pigtailed martial artist had a point. Akane didn't handle nudity very well, from what he had heard and seen. Especially where Ranma was concerned. Not that Ryouga handled it well either, but his normal response was to get a nosebleed, and sometimes pass out (not slap/slam the hell out of those nearby). He was lucky earlier that he had been angry and distracted enough not to dwell on the three nubile female forms on the lower deck of the ship.

"Ugh." He wiped a trickle of blood from under his left nostril. Just thinking about it, and he'd gotten a nosebleed. He felt terrible even having that reaction, like it was betraying Akari in some way. Ranma looked at him as they walked, and the other boy shook his head sadly.

"Still gettin' nosebleeds, P-chan?"

"Don't call me that, Ranma!" Ryouga warned, for what felt like the thousandth time.

"Ah, but there's no one awake but us." Ranma pointed out. "Now that I think of it, there's something I've always wanted to do…"

"Eh?" The lost boy grunted.

Ranma took a deep breath.

And yelled, "RYOUGA IS P-CHAN! P-CHAN IS RYOUGA! ARE YOU ALL BLIND!"

After a few seconds of silence, Ryouga deadpanned. "Well, I'm glad you got all that out _now_ and didn't let it eat you up inside."

"Ohhhh, but that felt so good!" Ranma shook his fist in exclamation. "I can't believe no one else has figured that out yet!"

The lost boy had to agree. "You'd think Nabiki, of all people…"

"It isn't like she isn't even there when…"

"When you all but screamed it out? Ryouga is P-chan, P-chan is Ryouga. No: you had to be creative, and just call ME that, and P-chan, me." Ryouga grumbled, angrily. "Look. I don't care what you did. Just don't call me that anymore. I'm not sleeping in Akane's bed, and I don't plan to. I just want to leave whole mess in the past."

"Yeah, yeah." Ranma waved his right hand dismissively. "It wasn't exactly your proudest moment."

"No. It was not."

They reached the lift.

Then:

"And Kasumi! How many times did she find your clothes lying around? Times that just happened to coincide with P-chan appearing? Didn't she make the connection! Didn't she even get suspicious?" Ranma was venting now, and Ryouga let him. It was funny to hear, in a way, just how frustrated his old enemy had been with the whole P-chan thing.

"Tendo-san knows. I'm sure of it." Ryouga added, "I mean: he's seen me transform. At least twice."

"Kuno and Kodachi have seen me turn right in front of them. They still don't know any better." Ranma complained. "Then again, Tendo-san knows about the curses. I wonder why he hasn't told anyone."

"Who knows?" Ryouga shrugged. "I tried to bring it up once, and he just kind of zoned out."

They went down the lift to the lower deck.

"Azusa figured it out right away," Ryouga admitted. "And she's an airhead."

"I dunno…" Ranma argued. "She was real childish, yeah. But 'airhead?' That may not be fair."

"That's the impression she gives."

"True."

"Maybe she's an observant airhead."

Ranma chuckled at that, and even the lost boy cracked a small grin. Then they approached the area where the Tendos were 'stored.' Ranma frowned, and looked to his side at his partner. "So: how are we going to do this?"

"I'm not letting Nabiki out," Ryouga said, quickly. "She'd probably charge me for the view, or blackmail me saying I felt her up."

"I'm not letting Akane out," Ranma responded. "I ain't been hit in a week, and I don't want to get walloped now."

"What about Kasumi?"

"Come to think of it, I'm not lettin' any of 'em out in my birthday suit!" Ranma pushed Ryouga towards the cylinders. The forms of the four Tendos were indistinct from even a ten or so feet away, obscured by the faintly glowing orange fluid they were suspended in.

"Er…" Ryouga hesitated, and turned away, seeing Akane's murky features.

"Don't be such a pussy!" Ranma egged him on, and then snapped his fingers. "But if you really don't want to… as usual I've got an idea that saves both our hides."

* * *

Kasumi's capsule opened with a hiss, and she fell out into his arms, the orange suspension fluid slouching off her slender arms and body. He looked down to see if she was all right, while she coughed up the ooze that had been in her lungs. Slowly, she looked up at him, and recognition dawned on her.

"Father?" she asked, looking up with surprise and relief.

"It's all right, Kasumi-chan." Soun smiled reassuringly. "You're safe now."

"Oh father! I had the most terrible dream! It was so horrible!" Kasumi cried, more hysterical than she had been in years. "There were these little _youkai_, these demons, and they broke into my room!"

"Ah, Kasumi-chan…" Soun held her at arms' length, his fatherly tone firm and reassuring. He then held up a large yellow and black tunic. "Could you please put this on and let your sisters out?"

Kasumi just then noticed her dear father's clothing, or lack thereof. And over his shoulder, she saw Akane and Nabiki suspended in some sort of giant metal and plastic jars, also sans clothes. Looking hesitantly to her right, at the wall, she saw a window with a view like few had ever witnessed firsthand.

"Oh dear." Kasumi's trademark calm set in. "Are we on that Russian space station, or the new American one?"

* * *

It took some time, but the entire Tendo family assembled in the command room. Ranma and Ryouga waited outside, while the girls got dressed. Ranma still lacked any sort of covering, and Ryouga had stripped to his boxer briefs. With the door closed, the (likely) conversation in the room just behind them was completely muffled. The ship, which seemed to have power if not direction, operated in perfect silence.

Ranma also seemed to be in a more serious mood, now that the girls were up.

Ryouga, for one, didn't mind the quiet. It was a nice change of pace, and he and Ranma had shared many hours in silence on the Tendo roof, usually contemplating their next fight, or their martial arts techniques, or just appreciating the Art in the presence of one who felt the same way. The more the lost boy thought about it, the more he came to think that he and Ranma fought the most when they exchanged words.

Either Ranma would say or do something that got him going, or he would do or say something that had the same effect. It had been the same when they were younger, except back then there had been no real appreciation of the other as a test for their skills. Maybe, just maybe, Ranma had been more casual about all those years ago, but to Ryouga (who had had little experience with other martial artists) it had struck him as persecution.

Still waiting for the signal to enter, and for word that the three girls were decent, the two young men lounged around. Ranma was the first to voice his thoughts.

"_Ki_ flows… strangely here. And not just because we're in space."

Ryouga grunted in agreement.

"And the air… it isn't just the smell," Ranma said, mentioning the sudden and strong reek of decay that came from the slain aliens still scattered around the ship. "It feels wrong."

The other boy smiled, wanly. "It'll seem worse when we start to run out, I think."

"Depressing as always," Ranma replied. "Don't you ever get tired of it?"

Ryouga laughed sadly. "It isn't something you choose to be. Its something you're chosen to be."

"Well, whatever. You do have a point, though, about the air," Ranma said, still speaking seriously. "How long can we stay up here before we run out? How long before we run out of water, for that matter?"

Ryouga gave Ranma a quick, appraising look. "You think we should've kept the Tendos in…?"

"No!" Ranma answered, quickly. "Definitely not. I don't know what those things do. No one does. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was bad. When we looked over the ship before, that table…"

Ryouga was surprised at this, but curious about his rival's observations. "What about it?"

"Why would they have a table there? And there were machines hooked up to it." Ranma licked his lips, the slightly dry air taking its toll. "I've seen programs. Stuff on the TV. I think they put people on that table."

The lost boy snorted, the topic of conversation bringing back his anger from before.

"Ranma…" he started to say, but couldn't follow through. He'd wanted to sound angry, but his voice had come out pained. It hurt to talk about. It hurt to think about. And the last thing he wanted was to break down, to show weakness, in front of Ranma. No. If he couldn't say it like a man, he wouldn't say it at all.

Thankfully, the door opened, and Soun's head popped out. Ranma, knowing what this meant, picked up one of the large alien weapons lying on the ground from before to cover himself.

"They're ready," the older man said, and motioned them inside. Ranma and Ryouga exchanged glances, and walked in, the lost boy taking the lead. Both knew Ranma only followed to use Ryouga as a shield for his own nudity. Normally, something like this would've provoked a fight over the last scrap of clothes, or some other affair. However, with the lives of others in the balance, they didn't have the luxury of showing signs of panic, nervousness, or internecine hostility. This situation was another enemy to overcome. Their personal rivalries and differences could wait.

At least for a little while.

Kasumi was the first to greet them. She had made due with wearing Ryouga's tunic, as she was the tallest of the three sisters, Nabiki being about an inch shorter, and Akane two. She looked somewhat strange, wearing a heavy shirt with long sleeves that went past her small wrists, but it also went south far enough to cover her. She bowed politely.

"Thank you both so much!" she said, with a smile. "And thank you, Ryouga-kun, for the clothes."

He chuckled, embarrassed. "No, that's quite alright!"

Behind Kasumi, Akane was unbowed, but looking very grateful for one who knew her mannerisms well enough. As the shortest, she wore Ryouga's mustard colored undershirt, but used her hands to keep it as low as possible. Nabiki, meanwhile, had his pants, and she had fashioned a makeshift bra for herself out of most of his remaining bandannas. Of everything he had surrendered, Ryouga disliked parting with those the most. The bandannas were his most effective and lethal weapon against the aliens onboard. What if more aliens showed up, somehow? She even had his belt around her waist, since the pants would never fit otherwise.

"Hey, Ryo-baby. Here." Nabiki walked over, and handed him a handful of bandannas, six in all. He took them, and forced out a smile for the mercenary girl.

"Didn't use them all, I see," he said with forced mirth. With his eyes, however, he watched Akane walk up to Ranma, and whisper in his ear. Even though he had, for some time now, come to accept the eventuality of their pairing, it still grated on him. Even seeing Ranma obviously embarrassed didn't diminish the feeling of… was it _jealousy_?

Akane hugged him, obviously happy to be free and alive.

'Yes…' Ryouga confirmed it. 'It is jealousy. That could have been me and Akari. But it won't be. Ever again.'

"Ryo-baby?" Nabiki asked, still in front of him. His eyes went back to her, a little narrower than before, and he watched her turn around, showing off her handiwork. Facing him again, she grinned. "I guess we do owe you one for this."

She leaned in closer.

"And not just for the clothes. If you hadn't shown up…" She trailed off.

"Yes." Soun choose that moment to interrupt. "It is a strange, but not unwelcome, coincidence that you showed up when you did. Especially since you don't drop by as often as before."

Ryouga treated Soun with a measure of suspicion. It was difficult to measure the man properly, and there could be no doubt that he knew more than he let on, even if he choose not to act on that knowledge very often.

"What do we do now?" Akane asked, probably only catching the last half of her father's comments. "How do we get back home?"

Ryouga wished he had an answer.

He looked at Ranma again. The other martial artist had only the large alien stun weapon covering himself, but still he managed to keep an air of dignity. It was something Ryouga suspected he would lack in identical circumstances. As he was, he felt extremely embarrassed of being in his underwear, but tried not to think of it. Knowing that the man he had hated for so long was worse off helped a lot in that effort.

"Yes. We need some sort of plan," Soun replied. He sat down on the floor, after giving a quick nervous look to the two alien bodies pushed into one of the room's corners. Kasumi sat to his left and Akane to his right. Ranma sat down next to Akane, and Ryouga next to Kasumi. Nabiki walked around, and sat between the two boys. Altogether, they formed a rather rough circle.

"We should consider our options, our abilities, and our objectives." Nabiki immediately took the lead, speaking confidently and convincingly. Ryouga wondered if she sounded like her professors in college. Either way, he knew she was smart - the smartest of the group without a doubt.

"Options. Abilities. Objectives," Nabiki said, repeating the words to drill them into the minds of those present. "Then, we should brainstorm for solutions. And after that, we can produce a final course of action we can follow through with."

The other four people in the room stared at her.

"What?" Nabiki asked. "Come on! It isn't like I'm using newspeak! What are our options?"

"Well, we sure can't stay on the ship!" Ranma said the first to work up the courage to make a definitive statement under the circumstances. "Ryouga and me were talkin' earlier. We don't know how much air is on this thing."

"And water." Ryouga spoke from experience. "We don't have any water. Dehydration is an ugly way to die."

"This ship seems very advanced," Soun pointed out. "Maybe it has some way of replenishing air and water."

"It doesn't even have bathrooms," Akane interjected.

"So where did these… _iseijin_ go, when, ah, they…" Kasumi struggled to phrase it without being vulgar. Likewise, she has adjusted her vocabulary, so the creatures were now 'aliens' and not demons. While nothing in her wording indicated disgust, her tone left just enough to convey her feelings towards Earth's 'visitors.'

"Maybe they hold it in," Nabiki said, with a sly smirk.

"We should set aside an area for… that," Soun offered, coughing to make sure he had everyone's attention. "Perhaps one of these spare… pod. Things."

The other members of the group nodded, in quick (if embarrassed) agreement.

"Alright," Nabiki said, again assuming the lead. "We can't stay here for more than… how long, based on the water problem?"

Everyone looked at Ryouga.

"Oh? But I'd know?" Ryouga asked, instinctively defensive. Even if he had come to terms with his directional dysfunction, it still wasn't something he liked people drawing attention to. Then again, it wasn't like everyone present didn't already know about it. "Look. It's hard to say. It depends on what you do, how much you sweat, if you eat anything. Longest I've gone without a drink is … about two weeks four days. I think I was in the Gobi Desert. Or maybe the Australian Outback. But that was a special case. None of you could last that long, except maybe Ranma."

"What do you mean, 'maybe Ranma?'" Ranma asked, annoyed as being compared unfavorably to anyone or anything on or off the Earth.

"And what do you mean; it was a 'special case?'" Nabiki pressed. "Be more specific."

Ryouga sighed. "I'm used to that sort of thing. I've _trained_ for it."

At that, Ranma and Soun nodded, understanding. Nabiki, for one, still did not. "You trained for it?"

"Yes," Ryouga said, and elaborated. "I've exposed myself to the elements. Sometimes just out of bad luck or planning, I've had to go for a while without food or water. Cold. Heat. Dehydration. You can train yourself to survive these things. Ranma – tell her what I mean."

"A martial artist," Ranma lectured, "Can overcome any obstacle through training."

"Well put," Soun seconded.

"So you could train yourself to breathe underwater?" Nabiki asked, dubiously, fishing for the worst possible allegory she could come up with on the fly.

All three males seemed to seriously consider it, and 'hmm'd.

"Ok," Nabiki said, conceding to their stubbornness. "How long do us mere mortals have?"

"If you want a time limit to work within…" Ryouga continued, "I'd say a week, if you do nothing but sit around. Half that, if your activity is minimal."

At that, the group was silent.

"How long'd you go without takin' a piss?" Ranma asked, lightening the mood.

Ryouga puffed out his chest proudly. "87 hours, I think."

"Man…" the pigtailed boy quipped. "You ain't even human…"

Instantly, Ryouga's good mood vaporized. Ranma quickly realized he'd said the wrong thing, at one of the worst times, and felt worse about it than usual. Ryouga had some sort of thing going against these aliens, probably related to what happened before at Akari's farm. Maybe they'd probed her? Then, rethinking Ryouga's tone and mood and cold hateful precision in his attacks, Ranma entertained a far worse conclusion.

Ryouga's enraged scowl didn't fade, and the tension in the room raised a notch.

"You take that back…" Ryouga said, his voice a low hiss.

And then, Ranma did something he never expected to do.

He apologized.

"Sorry," he said, and meant it. "I didn't mean it like that. I didn't."

Ryouga let out a deep breath, controlled himself (a feat in and of itself), and looked up at the ceiling, hiding his face. Another uncomfortable silence descended, before Nabiki clapped her hands together.

"Back to business?" she asked, sounding hopeful. "Ok. So we have less than four days. We have to either land the ship, get someone to come to us, or get whatever life support system this thing has working to prolong our stay. Can anyone think of any other options we have?"

Everyone looked around, no other ideas being proposed.

"Ok, then," Nabiki continued. "Then what are our abilities? What can we do with this ship, and with what we have at hand?"

"Nothing and zilch," Ranma replied.

"We can open doors," Akane replied, more seriously. "And that weapons locker you guys found."

"But we can't use the weapons!" Ranma argued.

"We could learn!" Akane shot back.

"And what, blow up the ship!" Ranma replied in kind. "Great idea!"

"Ranmaaaa!" Akane growled, getting angry.

"We can look outside," Kaaumi spoke up, hoping that her calm tone would sooth the rising ire of certain parties. It seemed to have the desired effect. "At least the view is very pretty."

"Makes me wish I had my new digital camera," Nabiki added, though Ryouga suspected that if she did have her piece, the earth and stars wouldn't be her only targets.

"We also need to get everyone else out of their … pods," Soun said, and everyone nodded in agreement with his surprisingly common sense statements. The people in there were his neighbors and acquaintances. Ranma didn't seem to know them, and Ryouga certainly didn't, but the girls and Mr. Tendo had a special concern in getting them free.

"We don't have much to work with. We need to get some systems operational on this ship." Nabiki looked over her shoulder, at the south end of the room. "You boys said there was some sort of alien control system over there, right?"

"Yeah," Ranma answered. "But it went dead when Ryouga went all Texas chainsaw massacre on the pilot."

"Have you tried to get it working?" Nabiki then asked.

Ranma and Ryouga looked at each other, Ryouga's scowl diminished slightly. And then the pigtailed boy laughed, abruptly.

"Yeah, right!" he said, and shook his head. "Ryouga and me? Do we look like the types to try and hack into some alien computer? Maybe upload a computer virus while we're at it?"

"Huh?" Ryouga asked, again not quite getting the reference. Not getting any of them, actually.

"Well, we have to try something!" Nabiki snapped. "Maybe it isn't as hard as you think. Just because it isn't some new martial arts thing doesn't mean you shouldn't even give it a try!."

As if to prove her point, she walked over to the featureless console. It looked like a solid plate of the ubiquitous alien metal that made up the ship. There weren't any depressions, or keys, or buttons, or anything. It didn't even glow. She bent over, and started looking at it. There was nothing on the underside, either, and the rest of the group went back to talking.

"We really need to find where they put our clothes." Ranma grumbled. "Why'd they strip us, anyway?"

All three men present waited for Akane to make a 'pervert' comment.

It never happened.

"What?" Akane finally said, sensing that they were waiting for her to say something. "Who knows why they do anything? They're ALIENS."

"It is a good thing Grandfather Happosai isn't here." Kasumi remarked. All three and a half girls shuddered at the thought.

"We'll keep looking. I'm sure we'll find everything," Ryouga spoke up, trying to sound reassuring.

'After all,' he thought, 'They returned me with all my clothes, both times.'

"They better!" Nabiki said from where she worked. "Those were my favorite PJs!"

"You mean your favorite of my PJs?" Akane inquired, knowing Nabiki's long-standing policy of permanently borrowing her sisters' clothes.

Nabiki's response was little more than a mumble.

"Which reminds me…" Ryouga jumped in. "Where's my wallet? And my passport?"

Everyone looked at Nabiki, who was currently wearing the lost boy's pants. She slowly turned, and gave them an innocent smile. "How would I know?"

Everyone just frowned.

"Ok. Ok. Here." She reached into the back pocket and took out the two items. Ryouga stood up and took them. Having dealt with the middle Tendo before, however, he checked the wallet first.

"It seems a little light," he said in a deadpan. "I remember having five thousand in here, not three."

Nabiki sighed, sadly. She wasn't getting any sympathetic looks either. With a flourish, she reached into her makeshift bra (made out of HIS bandannas no less), and pulled out the two thousand yen. Opening his wallet, Ryouga looked at the picture of Akari in it with longing, but quickly closed it, not wanting to think about that before he got more depressed. Already, bits of green _ki_ were leaking out into a weak aura.

"Sorry. Bad habit," Nabiki admitted, after getting caught red handed.

"Very," Ryouga agreed, taking back the money. He was about to stomp away from the borderline kleptomaniac, when he noticed something strange about the panel. His _ki_ seemed to be drawn to it. Without a word, he stood in front of it, and held out his hand, concentrating more energy into his palm. The _ki_ was still drawn to the blank panel, but nothing seemed to be happening. To his side, he saw Nabiki looking at him quizzically.

Getting self-conscious, Ryouga cursed the damned thing.

'Work, you piece of alien junk!' he thought, angry already. 'WORK!'

WORK

The panel lit up, an explosion of light sending Ryouga stumbling backwards. Green projections, forming an expansive and detailed hologram, appeared out of thin air. Alien text, some like strange chicken scratchings and some block-like, scrolled up and down and left and right. Pictures and diagrams then appeared as well.

A voice spoke, chattering and shrill, like a thousand insects.

"Hey! Watch out!" Ranma quickly got to his feet, as the floor in the middle of the room began to warp and bend. Kasumi yelped, and Ryouga saw Akane and Nabiki back up against the walls. The bulge in the floor grew, liquid metal reshaping itself like a toadstool growing out of the ground. He readied his fists, and saw Ranma react similarly.

Then the bulge flattened out, became an oval, and solidified.

It was a table.

And around the new table, chairs rose in similar fashion, forming out of the floor itself. They were small, too small for normal people, and after forming they (and the table) pigmented a shade of dark purple. Ryouga moved to the side, as another small chair formed in front of the console.

"Wow. Awesome," Ranma said what they were all thinking.

"You know what this means, don't you?" Nabiki squealed happily. "We're going to make a fortune! A fortune!"

While the others smiled and celebrated this first little victory, Ryouga looked back at the alien equipment with distaste and undisguised hostility. Everyone was being too optimistic. He only hoped they didn't get the hopes up, just to be dashed to pieces later, against the uncaring rocks of reality. Then again, just because that tended to happen to him, didn't mean it applied to everybody else. Time would tell.


	5. In the Sky with Diamonds Part II

As cliché as it sounded, it was quiet; literally too quiet.

Kasumi didn't like it. Of course, she didn't say as much, as it would upset the others, but it was true nonetheless. It just wasn't natural. Kasumi imagined that, if not for the view outside, anyone would think that they were a hundred feet below the earth, instead of a thousand miles above it. The ship they were in had no engines, made no noise, and the blackness outside was an empty vacuum, only relieved of monotony by a seemingly random smattering of tiny lights.

Kasumi looked around for something to do.

Work always helped to clear her mind, and calm her nerves. She tried to imagine that this was little different from when they had been stranded on that island, a year ago. Back then; people had panicked at first, before settling into a familiar routine. Ryouga and Cologne had helped them find food and water in the jungle, and in a few days everything had been just fine. Akane and Ranma went back to arguing, Ryouga went back to pining, and Ukyou and Shampoo even picked up where they had left off.

She just had to relax a bit and things would work out. Of course, back then, strange men from the island of _Togenkyou_ (who were also apparently half animal) had abducted them. That had been unusual and a bit distressing, but not really life threatening. This was different. Kasumi looked away from the window behind her, where one of Them still lay, apparently dead. It had obviously been beaten very badly, probably by Ryouga (because it, and she, were on the lower deck of the ship), but the face of the little _iseijin_ still sent a cold shiver down her spine.

It was like some evil deformed child.

She looked away quickly, and winced, closing her eyes tightly. It was dead. Dead. Dead. There was no need to worry about it. No need to be afraid of it. Kasumi chided herself for being so silly, so childish, but she couldn't help it. Plus, the bodies Ranma and Ryouga had left in their wake had made a mess of things. They smelled bad, and they looked hideous.

Resolved in her course of action, Kasumi faced the body and took a few tentative steps towards it. Gulping loudly, she kneeled down, reached out, and touched it lightly with the tips of her fingers. It was cold and clammy, like a fish after it had been scaled. Or like an eel, but without the slime.

She wanted to move it.

Get rid of it.

Settling both her hands on its crushed torso, Kasumi tried to get a grip on it, as the soft flesh moved under her hands. Her eyebrows turned in worry and disgust, as she tried a little harder, pushing it back a bit towards the wall. It didn't move easily. The body was already getting stiff, though the flesh had become almost jelly-like. Green and purple blood trickled down from its wounds and mouth, and Kasumi heard a sudden gurgle from inside it.

She immediately jumped back and covered her mouth to keep from screaming.

Except that left a dead alien taste on her lips, which she quickly wiped away with the back of her hand. It wasn't just disgusting; it was horrible! Just horrible! She couldn't do it, and for some reason she wanted to cry. Why? They were alive. They were safe. There was nothing to worry about. Footsteps came her way, and Kasumi turned, eyes wide.

It was just Akane.

The younger girl looked at her sister with concern as she approached. She had stretched out Ryouga's undershirt pretty well, but Akane had complained about not having clothes numerous times in the hours since they had been freed. Which brought up another question: how long had they been out? Was it night or day?

It was all so confusing!

"Kasumi-neechan?" Akane asked, cocking her head to the side. "Are you ok?"

Kasumi remained outwardly calm and composed. She blinked to make sure her eyes were clear and quickly got to her feet. She smoothed out Ryouga's tunic, and faced Akane with her usual small smile.

Kasumi answered with a tiny nod and added, "I'm fine, thank you. Just startled."

"Can't say I blame you," Akane responded. "This place is creepy."

"How are things upstairs?" Kasumi asked. The ship was _incredibly_ creepy as it was, but the more one thought about what possibly went on within it, the worse it became. She had heard stories, and seen programs on the television. If there was any truth to them…

"Dad's looking for any hidden compartments in the weapon locker. Ranma and Nabiki are still wrestling with the ship controls. They found some kind of projector in the table or something, but no way to turn off the voice it makes." Akane shuddered. "I hate that sound."

"I know." Kasumi felt the same way. The shrill sound of the computer, the same language the _iseijin_ probably spoke, didn't make anyone very comfortable. It simply wasn't a sort of sound human beings could make. It was truly alien, and it almost hurt to listen to it for too long.

Kasumi looked back out the window at Earth.

"I want to go home, too," Akane said, accurately guessing Kasumi's thoughts. The two watched the world below, all blue and white, as it rotated almost imperceptibly.

"I hope the fish are doing well," Kasumi said, the topic catching Akane by surprise. "The baby _koi_. I think it is morning now… If we were home, I'd be fixing breakfast. But before that, I'd feed the fish. The baby fish all come to the surface when they see my shadow."

Akane nodded, but didn't have anything to say.

Her stomach spoke instead, growling hungrily.

"I guess my body knows what time it is," Akane admitted, with a smile. Kasumi smiled back, a genuine one, not forced. For a minute, the two sisters stood and shared the mutual company, before Akane looked to her side and grimaced.

"Ugh." She was obviously looking at the alien corpse. "We really should do something about those … things lying around. Being here is bad enough without having those vacant eyes staring at you."

"And the smell… like rotten cabbage," Kasumi agreed. "What do you think we should do?"

"Did you try moving one of them?" Akane asked, suspecting that she had.

Kasumi frowned just a bit at being found out. "They're just so…"

Akane understood perfectly. She had tried it herself, with the same result. She had never seen a dead body before much less tried to move one, but there was something distinctly unnatural about the dead aliens, something antithetical and repulsive to the touch. Akane wasn't normally squeamish, but apparently even she had her limits. For ten minutes she had tried to move one of them, but every fiber of her being has just rejected her plans. In a way, she was ashamed that he willpower hadn't been up to the task.

"Yeah." Then the youngest Tendo got an idea. "Maybe we should ask Ryouga to help. I mean, he didn't seem to mind bashing their heads in; he shouldn't mind picking them up, right?"

"Is he busy?" Kasumi queried, not wanting to bother the boy they already owed their freedom (and clothes) to.

"He's sulking around upstairs…" As Akane said it, she found the notion of calling the upper half of the ship 'upstairs' both weird and somehow distasteful. Then the younger Tendo girl sighed. "I tried to talk to him, to cheer him up, but he's depressed about something: something that happened to him. I think it has to do with the state we found him in. But, you know how he gets around… me. He's like a whole different person."

Kasumi understood, probably better than Akane herself did.

"If he is troubled, perhaps it would be best to give him something to do?" the older girl wondered aloud. Kasumi understood perfectly well how work helped keep one from falling into a funk. And she sensed that the lost boy had a lot on his mind. The ship was not so large that it was hard to find him. He was on the side of the ship facing away from the earth, looking out into the sea of stars.

"Ryouga-kun?" Akane asked, as they approached. The lost boy looked in their direction, and offered a weak smile.

"Akane-san? Kasumi-san?"

"Ah, we were wondering if you could help us with something?" Akane spoke for the two of them.

"Of… of course, Akane-san! I'd be happy to!" Ryouga answered, with just a small nervous stammer. Even after everything with Akari, Akane still tended to bring out the more insecure and shy little boy in him.

"All the… bodies lying around. Can you please find someplace to put them? Somewhere out of sight?" she then explained, "We already tried to, but…"

"No! Oh! Um. Sure. I mean: no problem, Akane-san! I'd be happy to take care of it. Of them. Don't worry about it," he said, and she bowed in thanks. Kasumi followed a heartbeat later. The younger girl gave him a happy grin, touched his shoulder, and went back to the control room where the others were. Ryouga's eyes watched her go, but his smile didn't quite reach his eyes.

Which struck Kasumi as strange. It was her observation that the lost boy usually went into convulsions of joy overtime Akane talked to him, much less touched him. A second later, he went back to looking at the stars, expecting Kasumi to also leave. When she didn't, he gave her another look.

"Kasumi-san?" he asked, this time.

"What are you looking at, Ryouga-kun?" she asked, concerned by his unusual behavior. She had seen him on the porch before, just staring up at the night sky. Sometimes, she heard him on the roof, and often Ranma joined him. But this seemed different. Between her father, Dr. Tofu, Ranma and Ryouga, she wasn't sure how to interpret men's moods anymore.

"What am I looking at?" He repeated her question, and scowled at the window, and at the majestic sight before him. "I'm looking for something."

"A… ship?" Kasumi guessed.

"Yeah. Or maybe just some kind of sign," he admitted. "I don't want to look at the Earth anymore. I don't want to look back."

"Back?"

"Out there, Kasumi-san… out there, on some world, these creatures are planning another attack. Planning on taking more lives. Damn them all to Hell." He growled low in his throat, his emotions mixed. "At least when I was after Ranma, I had some idea of where he was. He was in China, or he was in Japan. Then I found out he was going to Furinkan, and my revenge seemed within reach. Now… now I don't know where my enemy is, and I don't know how to get there."

"Don't you just want to go home?" Kasumi asked, not fully understanding his motivations.

"Home?" He scoffed, this time his anger was easily heard in his tone. "No. No I don't."

"Oh." Kasumi didn't know how to respond to that. She tried to sound nice and helpful, like always. "You're always welcome to visit us, Ryouga-kun."

He lowered his gaze, and closed his eyes. "T…thank you, Kasumi-san. I don't deserve it. I've done things… things you wouldn't approve of. And now this…"

"Do you mean killing those _iseijin_?" Kasumi gave him a bow, which he turned to face. "Ryouga-kun, even if you did kill them, it was to save us. I would never hold it against you."

"No, that's not…" he started to say, but instead bowed, stiffly and deeply. "Kasumi-san, you have always treated me with kindness. It is I who should thank you."

Kasumi smiled at this, and looked at him directly. "Ryouga-kun, if anything is wrong; if you want to talk about…"

He cut in, quickly. "Thank you, but I don't think so. I don't have anything I want to talk about. Please excuse me. I'll find some way to dispose of the bodies."

Kasumi watched him go, but felt that she hadn't helped him nearly as much as she had intended. Something was very wrong. Then again, men were strange sometimes. Dr. Tofu also didn't open up to her very much. Maybe there was something wrong with her approach? She would have to think of something else to get him to talk.

A thousand miles from home, it wasn't as if she had anything better to do.

* * *

"Try that one."

"Ok."

Nabiki pursed her lips in thought, but eventually shook her head. "No. No. Go back, and try the other one."

Ranma sighed loudly. He squirmed uncomfortably in the too-small seat, and looked up at the green-themed graphics that virtually surrounded him. He didn't particularly like computers. He hadn't in school, and he didn't here. Still, he was one of only two people who seemed able to operate them on the ship. Reaching up to one of the bracketed displays, he moved it with his index finger to the left, directing it to slide away into a tabulated form almost out of sight.

With his pointer finger, and his focused mind, he picked out another display piece. It expanded into a new set of brackets, revealing several lines of alien code, and some strange graphs and charts. Ranma sighed again. He was bored, and he wanted Nabiki to know it.

Instead, she hummed to herself, looking over the data.

"You can close this one," she finally said. "But… open that one from before. The one with all those spikes. I want to see that again."

Ranma grumbled under his breath, but did what she wanted. Another graphic appeared in green brackets against the projected black background. In it, a spiky looking line went all over the place, in three directions. It looked like a big, angry, pulsing sea urchin (and thinking of _uni _sushi made him hungry). Off to the side, lines and more alien scribbles popped up, and scrolled down.

"Ok. I think this is the wrong directory." Nabiki tapped him on the shoulder to make sure she had his undivided attention. She paced around, behind him. "Let's try going back again. To this one, right here!"

She pointed to one of the tabulated displays from before, on the left. They were lined up on both sides, instead of on the bottom, like they were on the computers Ranma had used before in school. He was also starting to get a bit of a headache from mentally pushing things around. Still, he was silently amazed it worked at all, given that he was human and not some freak alien.

"Ok. Ok." Ranma did what Nabiki asked, and pulled up the other directory. It had several lines of alien script, attached to what looked like a tree, or some sort of diagram. Nabiki stared at it, while Ranma waited. After almost a minute, his patience wore out.

"Well?" he asked, a little crossly.

"Try… that one." Nabiki pointed to one of the scripts. Ranma did the same, thought about where his finger was, and the system barked at him. An alien voice sounded, making shrill insect noises. Nabiki clucked her tongue, making a 'tsk' sound, and went back to staring.

"We're not getting anywhere," Ranma complained. He didn't like being stuck helping Nabiki with the computer. Better to have Mr. Tendo's job, trying to find a way to get the doors open on the other stasis tubes. Or Akane's job of trying to find their damn clothes. Or Kasumi's job of looking for water.

Or better yet, get Ryouga back in the Small Seat!

How long had the lost boy been at it with Nabiki here? A couple hours? Ranma was sure he'd beaten that time by now. It felt like an eternity, and he was HUNGRY.

"Ah!" Nabiki clapped her hands together excitedly. "There. That root right there!"

"_Yare yare_…" Ranma grumbled the equivalent of a sarcastic 'hurray,' and poked at the spot. The system quickly translated his thoughts. He could do it without the hand motions, but it was much harder to concentrate properly, and for some reason his head was already starting to hurt. In front of him, a display appeared in the same brackets as usual. There was a small flashing alien ideogram, and then a graphic appeared.

This one was, at the very least, more impressive than usual.

"That's us. The ship, I mean," Nabiki said, pointing to the small, two-layered pancake in the middle of the animation. It had a small halo around it, along with some more nonsense alien words. There were also some squiggles that headed out from the bottom of the picture. The ones that intercepted the little ship and its halo didn't continue through to the top. A side bar indicated more information.

Akane chose that moment to pop in.

"Hey!" she greeted, relatively chipper, given the situation. "Any luck?"

"Perfect timing, actually. I think I've found something important." Nabiki motioned her sister over, and made a gesture at the little ship in the picture. "A lot of the systems seem to be coded or something. We can't access them, and when we try, we get yelled at."

"So you still don't have a way to move the ship?" Akane asked.

"No. Not yet," Nabiki admitted. "But we're making progress. This is some sort of energy field, I think. I was hoping it had to do with movement. I think that there's a good bet that we were just initializing things out of order. Like trying to start a car before putting in the keys."

"If you say so…" The younger Tendo wasn't about to argue.

"We'll find out in a second." Nabiki pointed at the side tab. "Let's see what this is."

"Fine. Here goes." Ranma opened it, revealing another bracketed display, this one with a huge long list of strange names, and a red dot in front of each. At the top of the display, another line curved, like an upside-down cup, and next to it, a right-side-up cup. He waited a few seconds for his partner to say something.

"See anything you like?" he asked, when Nabiki didn't respond.

"Actually… I do. That look familiar, Akane?" her finger touched the holographic line at the top of the display.

"That's a…" Akane squinted a bit, remembering. "A sine curve, right?"

"Sine curve?" Ranma thought about that. "I… I remember something about that. Some geometry thing. It had to do with circles."

"Yes, that's one thing it relates to," Nabiki replied. "But more importantly, for us, so are radio waves."

"That's a radio?" Akane asked, walking closer. She was curious, now.

"No. I don't think so." Nabiki pointed to a small bar. "That should scroll the data. Move it up, Ranma."

"Yes, ma'am." Ranma did as asked, feeling like a dumb third wheel. He decided to listen carefully to what Nabiki and Akane said. Ranma Saotome did not have thick skin, and he disliked being in the dark about what was going on. Geometry and stuff had seemed useless before, but here it suddenly took on a greater apparent importance.

"See how it changes?" Nabiki smiled, and pointed to the wave as it moved and grew narrower. "Look? See?"

"I see it," Akane responded. "But what does all this mean?"

"Just hold on a second… Go back in the other direction now, Ranma. I want to be sure…" Nabiki laughed, and spun around happily, as Ranma scrolled the data ever downward. She never saw Ryouga walk in, and no one noticed him when he picked up one of the alien bodies before leaving.

Nabiki was too caught up on her own little victory. "Yes. I'm right! I'm right!"

"What?" Akane pressed. "What is it?"

"What we're looking at is the electromagnetic spectrum. Just like we all learned about in Junior High. These!" The middle Tendo daughter pointed to the long list of alien gibberish. "Are frequencies. They're numbers. Look how many of them are the same, and how simple-looking they are compared to the other stuff we've seen. They're definitely numbers, and they're definitely frequencies. Don't you see the pattern in them?"

Akane and Ranma looked closely at them. Sure enough, many shared the same squiggles, except for a different one at the end. The more they looked, the more they saw what Nabiki had seen.

"This isn't just a radio. It doesn't pick up just radio waves. This seems to be picking up everything in the electromagnetic spectrum. If you go down far enough, or if we had some way to skip to another point, I'm sure we'd come across the frequencies for visible light, too." Nabiki motioned for Ranma to move the bracketed graphic aside for the moment, and he did so, without tabulating it. They saw the screen from before.

"The ship," Nabiki lectured. "This ship… has some kind of shield I think. I don't know what exactly. But I think it is picking up all these frequencies, and absorbing them, or deflecting them, or something. None of them are being reflected back. That's what this is showing us. This is some sort of stealth system, keeping the ship from showing up on radar. Maybe making it invisible, too."

"I see." Akane then added, "But how does this help us?"

Nabiki hesitated before answering that. "Well… if we shut it down, then someone might see us."

"Yeah. And blow us out of the sky," Ranma said, leaning back in the chair. "You want to take bets on whether it'll be the Russians or Americans who nuke us?"

"Probably both," Nabiki acknowledged grimly. "But if we could also get the communications system working…"

"And we'll know when we've found that, how exactly?" Ranma's head lolled around on his shoulders, making loud cracking sounds. "My head is about to fall off. I need a break."

"Just five more minutes, ok?" Nabiki asked, using her 'I-know-what's-best so-do-what-I-say' tone of voice.

"What?" Ranma groaned.

"Just try and get some of the radio channels. They're… ah…" Nabiki sucked in a sharp breath, and wracked her brain. "Megahertz. Or is it Kilohertz?"

Ranma raised a disbelieving eyebrow. "Hurtz what now? How am I supposed to find this on here, much less know what you're even talking about?"

"Radio frequencies." Nabiki briefly looked over her shoulder and saw Ryouga walk in. He collected one of the alien bodies in the room without a word, and walked out. In fact, there were no bodies left. At some point, he had walked in and taken one, and Nabiki hadn't even noticed. She wondered, at first, why he was moving them, and then came to a disturbing conclusion.

"Radio frequencies," Nabiki said again. "Just kind of skim around. When you find one, see if another option comes up. Some kind of audio. Anything!"

Ranma relented. "Five minutes. Five."

"Thank you." Nabiki headed for the door, sensing something was going on behind her back. "Akane. Help him out. Make sure he doesn't miss anything."

Akane nodded. "Sure. Where are you going?"

"I'm going to see what the lost boy is up to with our billion dollar alien bodies." Nabiki put her hand to the door, pulled back, and opened it. The motion had already become second nature. With Nabiki gone, the two remaining Nerimites exchanged looks. Both of them suddenly became aware that, for the first time, they had been left alone together, and that fact slowly but surely began to make them feel nervous.

Ranma, who had just started to be comfortable in his lack of clothes, quickly became very self-conscious. Coughing, he lowered one hand to his lap, and went to work looking through the different frequencies. It was better than thinking that he was alone, in a room with his (preferred) fiancée, naked. And that she was wearing only a relatively thin white shirt. A top that didn't do much to conceal her womanly attributes.

He bit his lip. 'Oh man…'

Akane was leaning forward slightly, just to his right, looking at something in the alien display. Was she teasing him, or were the gods just trying to embarrass him? He cursed his lack of control, and tried to keep his tone of voice casual. "Ah. Akane… could you maybe move back a bit? You're kind of crowding me."

She seemed surprised by this. "You didn't complain when Nabiki…"

Ranma saw her eyes go down, and then up very quickly. She blushed bright red, stammered something unintelligible, and backed off. Ranma shifted again in the little seat, but had no intention to stand up. Not at the moment. For a few seconds, the two didn't know what to say, and settled for a pregnant silence.

Ranma went back to work.

"It… it ain't like ya never seen me before," he felt compelled to say, so he did. A second later, he regretted it.

"Never quite like that," Akane replied, and laughed softly. "You pervert."

"I ain't a pervert. It's natural!" Ranma snapped, defensively. He hadn't fully understood Akane's somewhat playful tone.

Then, he just had to add: "And it ain't like I'm attracted to ya or nothin'!"

He hadn't called her flat chested, or an uncute tomboy, so it was hardly the worst thing he'd ever said to her, but he could feel Akane seethe behind him. For a few seconds, Ranma cringed, ready for the inevitable.

"Well, you could've fooled me!" Akane yelled, and stormed off.

"Damn it!" Ranma slammed his head into the metal panel in front of him with a groan. Why did he always blurt these things out? He'd just wanted to explain himself, and before he'd known it, he'd said the wrong things. On land, sea, or in space, Ranma Saotome inserts foot in mouth.

And he sure as hell wasn't going to chase after her with a boner.

"Damn it all!" Ranma yelled, more loudly this time, and swiped randomly at all the green alien madness floating in the air around him, frustration coming out all at once. An alien voice chided him, and then something beeped. And it kept beeping. Looking up, Ranma saw something new in front of him: a new graphic, in a set of brackets. And as generally computer-illiterate as he was, its meaning was obvious.

In front of him, a little animated spaceship slowly circled the earth, fell out of orbit, and crashed.

"Well, this is just terrific!"


	6. In the Sky with Diamonds Part III

Ryouga wasn't sure why Nabiki was following him. It wasn't like she was very subtle about it, either. The girl was no Konatsu… then again; no girl could be like that particular _kunoichi_. After all, he was the first legendary female ninja not to be an actual member of that gender. Disturbing. But his mind was wandering off track, as it tended to.

Why was Nabiki following him?

He decided to ignore her and concentrate on the task at hand. Walking around, past the empty tubes that had once held the Tendo family, he saw Mr. Tendo fiddling with one of the control panels. Ryouga inclined his head as he walked by.

"Any luck, Tendo-san?"

"None yet." The father of three didn't bother to turn his head when he spoke. He just kept working. Ryouga understood, and kept walking, not wanting to break the other man's concentration. Luckily for the lost boy, the simple layout of the ship meant that even he could get where he wanted without problems.

Opening the door to the room with the … examination table in it, Ryouga walked by, and pressed his palm to the next door. The second one from outside. It opened in the usual fashion, once he moved his hand away, and Ryouga tossed the alien corpse he'd been carrying in. It landed in a heap with five others, a twisted heap of bloody malformed bodies.

"And that takes care of that!" He stepped away from the door, and it closed on its own accord. Probably pressure sensors, like those in the mall. That was how it worked, right? Ryouga had no idea, and didn't much care either. There was another panel up against the wall, near the door. Ryouga reached for it.

"What do you think you're doing?" Nabiki asked, from the other end of the room.

"Huh?" Ryouga gave her a quick look, and lowered his hand. "What's wrong?"

Nabiki put her hands on her hips. She was obviously annoyed by something. "I don't know. Why don't you tell me?"

"Um…" Ryouga indicated the door with his thumb, over his shoulder. "I was just going to dump these things outside."

"WHAT!" Nabiki roared, and one of the premier martial arts savants of his generation cringed in fear. "You were going to SPACE them?"

"Ummm…." Ryouga gave a small nervous smile. "Yes?"

"You idiot!" Nabiki grabbed his hand and started to drag him away from the controls. When they were out of reach, she stopped, and waved a scolding finger to his face. "Don't you DARE!"

"But…"

"No buts, Hibiki!" Nabiki yelled. "Do you have any idea how much those things are worth!"

He saw what he problem was now. His eyebrows fell into a look of distaste. "No. I don't."

"Tens of billions of yen! EACH!" Nabiki cried, interposing herself between him and the door controls. "And you just want to dump them out a… out an airlock? No! I won't let you!"

Ryouga thought, oh so briefly, about just gently moving her out of his way. He decided to reserve that option for later. Just thinking about pushing a girl around made him feel ill, and he knew Nabiki would take this sort of thing personally.

"Nabiki-san," he began, using a respectful tone. "We don't know anything about these creatures. They may look dead now… but I've encountered things which can come back from the dead. Things that can regenerate."

"Like… Saffron?" Nabiki guessed, correctly. She deflated a fraction at the thought of all the aliens behind her suddenly coming back to life.

"Saffron was the best example, yes. Ranma and Akane-san killed him, but he came back."

"Ranma… and Akane?"

"Without her, he'd have died. Several times." Ryouga shook his head. "But that's aside from the point. Not only can't we be sure those damn things are dead, for good, but we don't know if… if they release poison or anything when they decay. We don't know."

Nabiki saw some of the logic in his argument, but persisted. "You make some good points, Hibiki. I'm surprised."

He blushed a bit at the compliment. He wasn't used to anyone saying positive things about him. Then again, when people did, most of the time they were trying to trick him (and most of the time it worked). And given that this was Nabiki he was talking to, he quickly concluded that she was just manipulating him. He forced a frown.

"However," Nabiki added, still holding her ground. "I think the odds of those aliens rising from the dead are pretty low. It's been hours already and there hasn't been a peep from them. Even the many limbs you cut off haven't grown back. Moreover, if any sort of toxins are being released by them that we already haven't breathed in, then that problem can be solved simply by keeping the bodies in one area, separate from where we move around."

Ryouga's frown deepened. She was right.

"Wouldn't you agree?" she asked, with a gleam in her eyes.

"I…" He wanted to say no, but couldn't think of a reason why. "I suppose. But…"

"Furthermore, think of the benefit to medicine. To the sciences! To philosophy! It is our duty to bring these bodies back as proof of extraterrestrial life! How could you think about just throwing them away?" Nabiki took a few steps towards him, and Ryouga backed away.

"I…" He tried to defend himself.

She didn't give him the chance. "I know you don't like them, Ryo-baby. And I know they give Akane and Kasumi the creeps. To tell you the truth, they make me uncomfortable, too. But we should think things through, shouldn't we? We don't want to do something we'd regret later, right?"

His back hit the wall. "I guess so."

"So you aren't going to toss them into space, are you?"

"No," he said, and let out a deep breath he'd been holding. "No, Nabiki-san."

"You'll keep them in this room. Where we won't have to look at them. Right?"

"Yeah."

"Promise?"

The lost boy hesitated a second, but relented. "I promise."

"Thanks, Ryo-baby. I knew you'd see things my way." She smiled warmly at him, like a cat, and patted him on his shoulder as she took her leave. "And you can call me Nabiki, you know. We're all friends here."

He watched her go, and sighed.

Walking back to the controls, he was sorely tempted to vent the little bastards anyway, promises or no. He wanted them off the ship. He wanted them to burn up in the atmosphere. Then again, bringing them back to Earth would hurt the alien cause more than his own selfish and destructive sense of revenge. They were dead, he was sure of it. It was wiser and better not to destroy them, then. On Earth, scientists and doctors would probably dissect the bodies and perform other degrading experiments on them.

And that thought finally made Ryouga Hibiki smile.

* * *

Akane rubbed her eyes, fighting off sleep. 

She yawned and covered her mouth, even though no one else was awake to berate her for a lack of manners. Nearby, she saw Kasumi and Nabiki, sleeping close to each other. It reminded Akane of the sleepovers they used to have when they were younger. It had only been a few years ago, but it felt like a lifetime. Ryouga and Ranma slept far from each other, on the opposite side of the room. Both were sitting up, their backs against the wall, unlike Kasumi and Nabiki who were curled up on the floor. Akane's father was also sleeping with his back to the wall, near the door.

Akane tried not to look at her annoying fiancé.

Instead, her eyes wandered to the hologram that was on display in the middle of the room, projected over the table that had 'activated' when they got the control panel online. It showed a sphere, covered in a crisscrossing grid, and lines that outlined continents. Just above the sphere, a dot slowly moved, following a projected line. The thin green line curved around the sphere several times, before abruptly starting to descend. Shortly afterward, the line hit the sphere, in what looked like the South Pacific, near Samoa.

For several hectic hours, the assembled group had tried to interpret the information given by the display. Nabiki had seen several lines of alien code next to the dot, and guessed that they were a way of measuring altitude and velocity. Another bisecting line in the course probably indicated when they would begin to enter the upper atmosphere. A smaller bit of code in the upper right corner of the display seemed to indicate the time before they crashed down.

Nabiki had spent over an hour trying to decipher the alien numerical system. Akane had helped, but mostly she had tried not to get in the way. Her older sister had patiently sat and counted as the alien squiggles changed, then counted to see how many different squiggles went by before the next line changed, and then again for the next. Akane had not spoken much during that time, while Ranma and Ryouga had worked the controls, trying to get more information, but she had been quietly in admiration of Nabiki.

Her sister had always been smart, but Akane had never really seen her put it to any constructive use. Soon enough, Nabiki announced that she had (probably) figured out the alien system of numbers. The first two sets of numbers went by very quickly, but the second pair was easier to read before it changed. Nabiki announced that these were the equivalent of seconds, but with only about half the duration, and there were a hundred of them. Soon, she had confirmed that the aliens did seem to use a base ten numerical system, and that there were one hundred alien seconds in an alien minute, one hundred alien minutes in an alien hour, and (supposedly) so on and so forth. Meaning that there were a million alien seconds in an alien day, which was almost six earth days long.

That she had done the math and memorization in her head…

Akane had enough trouble just remembering the basics of what her sister had determined. Supposedly, the ship would make six orbits around the earth before it hit the atmosphere. According to the alien computer, and Nabiki's interpretation of the information, they had about nineteen thousand alien seconds before then. That was a little more than ten earth hours. How long ago THAT had been, Akane wasn't sure.

Above the table, the alien countdown continued.

But Akane couldn't read it.

It looked bad, either way. Despite everyone's state of exhaustion and anxiety, they had tried to discuss what the options were, in light of this new development. No one was sure what speed the ship would fall at, or if it could survive the crash. Nabiki was certain that it could survive reentry, since the computer plotted a course all the way down to the surface. The question was: would the ship survive that, and would anyone aboard it survive if the ship did? And even if some of them could (like Ranma and Ryouga), how would those without superhuman constitutions fare, like Nabiki and Kasumi, or even herself and her father?

Of that, no one knew.

So they had decided to take a break: three hours of sleep, before they went back to trying to get into the computer system. Kasumi, Father and herself could probably afford to sleep longer. None of them had Nabiki's experience with the alien writings, and Ranma and Ryouga were the only two on board who could actually use the interface. Akane glanced at the two boys and sensed that they weren't sleeping as soundly as they looked. Both had an air of tension, and of a readiness to pounce. Nabiki, on the other hand, was fast asleep.

Akane slowly got to her feet, and crept out of the room. Outside, through the nearest window, she could see the sun rising over the horizon of the earth. It was almost blindingly bright, and she had to turn away when her eyes began to tear. In that moment, a new concern arose in her mind. Did the aliens worry about radiation? Was the ship shielded for that sort of thing? Akane hoped so, though at this point there was little sense worrying about it.

She walked around the edge of the ship and took the personnel lift down. Not for the first time, she cursed the aliens for their lack of facilities. It just wasn't right to abduct people and expect them to hold it in until they got home! Walking the halls of the ship alone was still scary, but at least there weren't any alien bodies around anymore. After this experience, she had the feeling her phobia of haunted houses would be a distant memory.

She walked past the tube she had once been placed in. She hardly gave it a glance. There was a tube out of sight, way to the back on the other side of the ship, which they had marked for 'other business.' That was the only one she had an interest in. Heading there, Akane noticed something unusual. The other tubes on that side of the ship had normally glowed orange. Now they were blue.

"Huh." She shrugged, and kept walking. As she had said before, who knew why these aliens did anything? Maybe the change in mood lighting was…

Akane stopped.

Ahead of her, a face was pressed against the clear cover of the cylinder. Strips of flesh hung loosely off of a skull, its jaw opened in a wordless cry for help. The eyes were gone, leaving two ragged red hollows. Down the rest of the body, against the light blue fluid, Akane saw more pale bones and dissolving flesh. A potpourri of organs, red and yellow and one almost blue, floated in an emptied out abdomen.

For a few seconds, Akane forgot how to scream.

"Oh… oh god…" Akane's lower jaw trembled. In the tube next to the horrible sight, another person was frozen in a state of anguish, their hands at their throat, their body half dissolved. And past that, Akane could see another murky shape: a skeletal hand. She screamed. And screamed, until her voice nearly gave out.

Covering her eyes, she turned away, and ran.

'They were alive in there! They were awake!' Akane's mind boggled at the horror of it. While they had been together, while they had been sleeping, these others – their neighbors, their friends – had been… been… she couldn't even put it into words. Akane just ran, up the lift, and into the control room.

"Wake up." Her voice was small and weak at first. She shook her head, tears in her eyes, and spoke much louder. "Wake up! WAKE UP! We… we have… they're…"

Ranma and Ryouga's eyes opened instantly. Akane's father, too, was quickly awake. Nabiki and Kasumi looked at her crossly, both having just been sound asleep. Akane didn't care.

"Wake up! All of you!" She gulped in great breaths of air, fear and adrenalin coursing through her veins. "There's… its horrible! They're…!"

"What is it?" Ranma asked, as he got to his feet.

"The others…" Akane wiped her face. "They're dead! It killed them!"

"What?" This time it was Soun who spoke up. His eyes widened when he realized who Akane had to be referring to. He ran past her, and out the door. Ranma and Ryouga followed right behind him.

"Dead?" Nabiki wasn't as quick on the uptake. "Who?"

"Oh dear." Kasumi got it just then, and also made for the door.

"Wait!" Akane reached out to stop her older sister, but Kasumi was already through the doorway. Nabiki groaned, ran her hand through her hair, and followed in a more relaxed pace. Akane fell in behind her. She had no intention to look at what was happening. All of this – the aliens, the ship, the danger – it had seemed surreal, like an adventure. Now, suddenly, it was different.

This wasn't just a ship; it was a shop of horrors.

* * *

Soun got there first, the two younger martial artists only a second later. All three were shocked silent by what they saw. Hearing steps from behind, Soun turned and saw Kasumi getting closer. 

"Kasumi!" he barked, his voice deadly serious. "Stay back! Don't come any closer!"

"But father!" Kasumi protested, but didn't disobey him. She kept her distance. It was just enough that she couldn't see what was going on behind the backs of the three men.

"Gods…" Ranma whispered, looking from one macabre scene to the next. He didn't have words to describe what he was seeing. This wasn't just murder. This wasn't just torture. It was inhuman. Even as he watched, a little cord of muscle floated away from one of the bodies, broke into little chunks, and dissolved.

Next to him, Ryouga's face contorted in built up rage. "No…"

Two down from the first man, a girl no more than thirteen years old had her hands pressed against the clear material. Most of her face was gone, but her long hair waved back and forth, pushed aside by the occasional release of bubbles from below her feet.

"No," he said again, and closed his eyes, burying his face in his hands. "Not again…"

* * *

Akari's mouth moved, but made no words. Still, he could tell what she was saying, her brown eyes distant and resigned. Her chest heaved, and she gasped. Still, she had the strength to repeat that one word. 

"Ryo… ga…"

* * *

"NOT AGAIN!" 

The lost boy's eyes snapped open, and he let out a pained cry. His fist swung through the air, graceless but possessed of a terrible power. What Ryouga Hibiki punched, he broke. Bricks, concrete, boulders, cars, nothing stood against his strength. His fist hit the clear alien material with a thud, and bounced off to the side.

With another feral cry, he continued his attack, battering with his fists. Every blow glanced off, not leaving so much as a dent or a crack. Undeterred, he struck again and again, while the others watched in horrified silence. Then, a long red smear marred the material, as the skin on one of Ryouga's knuckles peeled away. That mark was followed by another, and then another, and yet more, as he hit again and again to no avail.

"Ranma…" Akane whispered, from where she stood next to Nabiki and Kasumi, both of which had come closer regardless of their father's orders. "Ranma! Do something! Stop him!"

Ranma nodded, and approached the lost boy. "Yo. Come on, man. Cool down before you hurt somebody…"

"Get away from me!" Ryouga swiped at the other boy, who nimbly danced out of the way. He then faced the tube smeared by his own blood.

"Ryouga-kun!" Kasumi cried. "Please…!"

"I swore. I swore that I wouldn't let it happen to anyone else." Out of Ryouga's right hand, his index finger straightened. "Am I so useless… that I can't protect anybody? This is my fault. What kind of man would I be if I didn't do all I could to set it right!"

"Listen, son," Soun kept his voice level and calm, a fatherly tone that had served him well many times in the past. "You'll hurt yourself if…"

"I don't care! I won't let this happen again!" Ryouga lunged at the cylinder, finger forward. "_Bakusai Tenketsu_!"

The breaking point technique roared, but the sound was not that of breaking glass, crumpling metal, or exploding stone. With a loud and gruesome crack, Ryouga's finger bent and broke. He fell forward with a howl of agony, his whole body shaking. Akane covered her eyes and shook her head back and forth.

"This isn't happening," the youngest Tendo said to herself, voice barely heard by those nearby "This isn't happening!"

"The…" Ranma blinked, hard. "The _bakusai tenketsu_…didn't work?"

"Holy!" Nabiki gasped. "Is he…? Did he…?"

Soun quickly ran over to the fallen youth. Nabiki hesitated, not knowing what to do, but Kasumi acted quickly. She joined her father near Ryouga's body, and tried to tear part of the tunic she was wearing. The material that made up the sleeves, however, was too tough, and she struggled. Luckily, Akane regained her senses, joined her, and made short work of it.

On the ground, Ryouga made a sound that sounded part cry, part laugh.

"We're food…" he said, and then louder. "We're food! I see it now! Rats and pigs and dogs! We're animals to them! Things to play with and eat and kill! Oh god, I see it all now…"

With a loud ripping sound, Kasumi tore a piece of cloth from Ryouga's tunic. His hands were bleeding, but the lost boy wasn't struggling or moving. After his declaration, he just laid there, eyes closed, bathed in the blue glow of death. Kasumi helped her father cover up the bloody scars on Ryouga's knuckles, and tried not to look or think about the dead that surrounded her, loomed over her.

Even as it was being wrapped tightly into a makeshift splint, Ryouga's twisted and broken finger mocked them, and their powerlessness to stop what was happening. The martial arts technique designed to destroy inanimate materials had, in turn, been broken. And so, apparently, had been the man who used it.

* * *

**END Chapter Two**

I know this last scene her is rather shocking and sudden, but again: XCOM aliens do this, among other horrible things. They're nasty, and coldly cruel, and they're out to turn mankind into chattel. This isn't a horror genre fanfic, however, so it won't exactly be the norm. I write it as appropriate to demonstrate why the aliens have to be stopped.


	7. El Dorado Part I

The year is 2005. For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. A thousand miles above the Earth and falling, the Tendos, Ranma and Ryouga search for a way to get back home, and escape the newly revealed horrors of the alien ship.

* * *

**The Road To Cydonia**

Chapter III  
_El Dorado _

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

Nabiki watched the countdown continue, and mentally translated how long they had left. The result was just as she expected: three and a half hours before re-entry. The middle Tendo was loath to admit it, but she was scared. Very scared. Unlike her younger sister, she was not accustomed to danger, or to physical hardship. And unlike her older sister, she had to keep her wits about her – she was the one in charge, by unspoken consent, and she had to hold things together. 

But she was scared.

Ranma was exhausted, and looked it. Something about the alien control system had drained him of his energy, and Ryouga was little better. She had assumed that Ranma was exaggerating when he described the fatigue and headaches he had been getting helping her use the alien apparatus. Now she could see that he had been, if anything, overestimating his own resilience. The pigtailed boy was slumped back in a too-small chair, massaging his temples.

Nabiki sat against the central table in the control room, and looked around at the rest of her family and Ryouga. No one wanted to walk the lower level of the ship anymore, and with good reason. Nabiki hadn't really comprehended the danger they had been in, not until she saw the aliens' handiwork. Just thinking about it made her sick to her stomach, but she swallowed her disgust, the taint still on her tongue and lurking in the back of her mind.

Kasumi, Akane and their father were together on one side of the room. Nabiki had thought that they would go to sleep, but all three of them fought fatigue and kept awake, even though they had nothing to do. Akane still looked a little shell-shocked by what she had seen, and Kasumi just looked concerned, but the tremble in her older sister's shoulders betrayed her. They were in trouble, and everyone knew it. In a far corner, Ryouga slumped forward, his right hand wrapped in tight cloth that kept the index finger from moving.

No one had said as much, but she could tell: they all thought that they were doomed. That this would be their last few hours of life. Nabiki couldn't blame them. That thought, and the frozen images of the dead on the floor below them, haunted her. Just a few hours ago, she had been happy that she'd been taken aboard the ship and the crew killed off by Ranma and Ryouga. Now, with this… it was like being gassed in a diamond mine, or running out of air in a bank vault.

It was just cruel.

There was a certain resignation to it, though, that came with time. Everyone below had died, after all. Why should they be different? Why should they have lived? It was only fair, now, that they die, too. This wasn't a way of thinking Nabiki had considered before, but there was a certain grim appeal to it. Then again, as she pondered that, something came to her.

"We were different," Nabiki said, softly. "We were…"

It was the most anyone had spoke in the last half hour. Everyone save the lost boy looked in her direction, curious eyes filled with hope. It was not an entirely pleasant sensation; Nabiki wasn't used to being the center of attention. As empowering as it could be, it generally wasn't something she particularly craved, either. Most of the real work (and most of the profit) was made behind the curtain, so to speak.

"Nabiki?" Kasumi asked.

"Forget them!" the middle Tendo suddenly blurted out. "Those people down there. Forget them! We're different!"

Kasumi's eyes narrowed just a little (as much as they ever did) in obvious disapproval. Their father echoed it. He also sounded upset with her. "Nabiki…!"

"We're different!" Nabiki pushed off the table, and looked around to Ranma, and then to Ryouga. "Look: I'm sorry for Mr. Yanagisawa, and Mrs. Hirata, and Reiko-chan, and everyone, but we can't think about that now! We have to survive, and we can survive! Think about it! Why are we here, and not them?"

Akane answered first, "Because Dad let us out?"

"Exactly!" Nabiki exclaimed. "And Ranma let him out! And Ryouga let him out! All our pods opened without a problem, but everyone else's… we couldn't get them to open at all, right?"

"Where are ya going with this?" Ranma asked. He didn't like Nabiki dismissing the deaths of so many innocent people, but he was curious as to what the mercenary girl was thinking.

"The aliens. They knew there was something different about us. Something special." Nabiki gave Ranma a pointed look, but frowned when she didn't see any sort of recognition in his eyes. Then she turned to face Ryouga, who was still looking down at his hand.

"What do you suppose that was, Ryo-baby?" Nabiki asked him, using the new nickname she'd given him post-rescue. Ryouga's shoulders hunched and he let out a self-depreciating snort.

"Well?" Nabiki asked, more sharply.

For a few seconds, Ryouga still didn't respond. Then, he looked up with dark eyes. "It was me."

"What?" Akane asked, surprised by this. "Ryouga-kun, what do you mean?"

"It was me," he repeated. "All me. I… I don't know how long ago… but they came to the farm. Akari's farm."

Ryouga paused again, as if to compose himself, but no one interrupted.

He took a deep breath. "They took us. They opened my mind… they saw everything. What I wouldn't show, they tore from me. The feuds. The fights. The martial arts techniques. They learned everything. About the Dojo… about the Amazons… everything. Everything!"

He choked back a strangled sound, the free fingers of his right hand clenching.

"It was me… me… my fault." He closed his eyes, not wanting to see them anymore. "The only thing they didn't learn was where. Where you were. Not exactly. It wasn't that I was strong enough to hide it from them... I just didn't know myself. So, they let me go. They screwed with my mind, and let me wander. Sooner or later, I ended up in Nerima. I always do, whether I want to or not. Only then, in Tofu's Clinic, did I realize what I had done. Remember what I had seen."

"They followed you," Nabiki said, her voice slow and controlled. "To us. Because we're different. Or at least a few of us are."

"I'm… sorry…" Ryouga buried his head in his left hand. "I didn't want… this. I didn't! I…"

"Forget about it," Nabiki quickly cut in. "Right now, all that matters is getting out of here. Not placing blame."

"Nabiki is correct," Soun added. "We must be focused on one thing at a time."

"Thank you, Daddy." Nabiki felt a strange rush of confidence. When was the last time her father had actually assumed an air of respectability? More to the point: when was the last time he had actually backed her up? It felt like forever. "Now. We can say for certain that they were after us because we are a martial arts family. So…"

"But," Kasumi interjected, "Nabiki, you don't know anything beyond the introductory forms. And neither do I."

"But Mr. Tendo does," Ranma answered. "And so does Akane."

"If it was something genetic, we'd still be useful as some sort of reference. We were close enough, by association, to be spared," Nabiki said, with absolute certainty. "They wanted us alive. Probably to study or something. It is possible that they still do."

"So?" Ranma asked, blinking. "Are you suggesting we try and get the ALIENS to save us!"

"I'd rather die!" Akane yelled; her voice possessed of a sudden fury.

"Imagine what they'd do to us when they discovered we don't have any special abilities," Kasumi reasoned. "We'd… what if we… ended up like…"

"You don't think I've thought about that?" Nabiki snapped. "But is dying any better? Damn it, I want to live!"

"And how would we contact them anyway?" Ranma pointed out. "I mean: we still haven't gotten the communications system working. And it isn't for lack of trying, either. My head feels like one of Akane's concrete blocks."

"There has to be something we can do! Some solution we're not seeing!" Nabiki turned to face the holographic display of their course projection. "The only other options are that we either die on impact, drown, run out of water or air, or have our lungs crushed into paste! Even the two wonder-twins here couldn't survive a mile underwater!"

Ranma gritted his teeth at the thought.

"If we can't call for help, we need to move the ship," Nabiki finished, her voice strained. "Maybe if we set off some sort of explosive outside?"

"All the alien weapons seem to be locked. They just won't fire," Ranma argued back. "Akane and me tried. Even if we kept fiddlin' with 'em, I don't think we'd get 'em to work."

"If only we could get out and push," Kasumi mused.

Nabiki scoffed. "Push off what? There's nothing out there!"

"No, wait!" Akane spoke up. "That's exactly what we can do!"

"What?" Nabiki asked. "What do you mean? I just said there's nothing out there to push off of…"

"It's a long shot, but it's a chance." Akane nodded, forming the plan in her mind. "We only need to move the ship a little, right? And we'll hit land?"

"Yes…" Nabiki responded, hesitantly. "But that's easier said than done."

"Ranma!" Akane then asked, "Do you think you can fire a _ki_ attack in space?"

"I, uh…" Ranma bit his lip, and thought about it. "I don't see why not. Then again, it ain't like I'd know for sure. I've never heard of it being done, but I can use it underwater just the same as on land, so it doesn't need air to work."

"It isn't like sound?" Nabiki asked, seeing where Akane was going with her idea. "It doesn't need a medium to travel through?"

"I… I don't know," Ranma admitted. "Maybe. You two ain't thinkin' what I think yer thinkin,' are ya?"

"For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, right?" Nabiki stated fact, but it was phrased as a question. Who knew if it applied to _ki_ attacks? "When you fire one of your special techniques, force tries to push you in the opposite direction, right?"

"Sure, ya gotta brace yerself…" Ranma shook his head, now sure that they actually meant to go through with this. They couldn't even find their clothes, much less anything like a spacesuit, which meant anyone going outside would do so virtually in the buff. "But this is crazy! Goin' out there? Inta space? Won't yer blood boil and eyes explode or something?"

"I don't… think so," Nabiki offered. "Didn't they do something like that in that movie: 2001?"

Ranma wasn't entirely convinced. Plus, he'd fallen asleep watching that one for lack of action. It didn't matter, anyway. "That was a movie, not real life!"

"I'll do it."

Everyone looked in the direction of the voice, and saw Ryouga, standing in the corner. Ranma felt the _ki _coming off the other boy. It was heavy, and dark: it was the fuel of the _shishi hokodan_. No one else there could feel it so sensitively, but Akane could see from Ryouga's expression what was to come.

"Ryouga…" Ranma began.

"No, Ranma... Even you have to admit this is right up my alley." Ryouga's voice had the sort of detached calm Ranma remembered him using, back when he had first perfected his signature _ki _attack. "My perfect lion's roar has always been stronger than your tiger's pride. Besides…"

He trailed off, but Ranma knew what he had meant to say.

'Besides… you have Akane. I have nothing.'

It was the spiral of despair; Ranma could see it, feel it. The lost boy was already building it up, for an attack that would rival the one he unleashed in the fight against the Musk Dynasty. That blast had leveled a hundred meters of forest in every direction. Ranma didn't like being outdone, especially by his rival, but he really couldn't compete in this case. The perfect _shishi hokodan_ was far more powerful than even his greatest _moko takabisha_, and the _hiryu shoten ha_ (his own _ougi_, or final attack) would be useless in this situation.

"Is this safe?" Kasumi asked, from where she sat, next to her father.

"This is Ryouga were talking about," Ranma answered, when he sensed that someone was going to tell Kasumi the truth. "If he can survive me whalin' on him, he can survive anything!"

"I suppose so," Kasumi said, but didn't sound convinced. Next to her, Soun gave Ryouga a simple nod

"Unless anyone else had any other ideas?" Nabiki looked around at the group. Of course no one had any other options. It made making the decision easier… a little. She continued, "Then we should consider this our last chance."

"But we'll still crash," Akane noted. "Even if we hit land, how will we…?"

"I think," Soun spoke just then, "we all know what the rest of us will have to do."

Nabiki nodded. "The pods."

"The pods?" Kasumi asked, with a trace of concern.

"They're damn near indestructible," Nabiki pointed out the obvious, and explained the rest. "And when Ryouga hit them, the people inside never budged. We'll be safer in them than…"

"No!" Kasumi yelled, and then covered her mouth, surprised by her own sudden reaction. "I mean, isn't there some other way?"

Akane frowned, deeply. "I'd almost rather risk it here…"

"Kasumi. Akane," Soun's voice was stern, and dignified. "You will both do what you must to survive. I, too, find it distasteful, but you will do this."

Kasumi bowed her head. "Yes, father."

Akane crossed her arms, but relented. "I know."

"I guess that leaves me," Ranma said, resting his arm against the back of the alien chair. "But… if I go down with the ship, does that make me the Captain?"

Nabiki actually seemed amused by the comment and laughed. "I'll call you anything you like, as long as you get us out of those damn tubes after we land."

"Ranma…" Akane said, but never finished her sentence. Even though it was her idea, her tone made it clear that she was starting to have second thoughts, now that it was actually being put into motion.

"We're wasting time," Ryouga spoke up, finally. He watched as the others left the room, Ranma and himself going last. They exchanged looks, but not words, before heading for the lower level of the ship. After all, what was there to say? This was a battle of a different sort, but each knew they could rely on the other.

Both were martial artists, and not afraid of death, but both worried about failure, and who they would leave behind. Martial artists had a duty to protect the weak, but that had always just been limited to whomever they tended to run into who needed help. Seeing the Earth out the window, both silently wondered if that was enough anymore.

* * *

The door opened on the far side of the small room, exposing it to space. Ten seconds later, it closed, and the room re-pressurized. Nabiki had volunteered herself to be the one working the door controls, which (unlike the command controls on the level above them) didn't require any sort of _ki _ability to operate. They were simple enough and worked like a touch screen, with a holograph superimposed over a seemingly plain plate of alien metal. Using them wasn't a problem.

The trick was in the timing.

From where she was, she couldn't see outside the ship, and the 'thrust' from their little gamble had to be at just the right time. They needed the ship to orient itself so that it roughly intersected the horizon of the Earth. If all worked according to plan, the force of the _ki_ attack fired outside the ship from inside would then give the ship enough of a boost to hit land instead of ocean.

Nabiki had the door mechanism down to a tee, but she had to wait for the signal from the others. Akane was on the leftmost window nearest to the airlock door, and Kasumi was on the right. Their view wouldn't be perfect, but when both gave the signal, it should be close enough. The ship was slowly spinning on a vertical axis, so it was a matter of waiting. Of patience. Ranma and Soun were on opposite sides of the door between the 'examination room' (where she was), and the rest of the saucer-shaped ship.

Besides, no one wanted Kasumi or Akane to see what explosive decompression would do to the lost boy. Akane considered him a good friend, and Kasumi was… well, she was Kasumi. It would only be ten seconds, but Nabiki had no idea of the kind of damage that could be done in that time. Not that she wanted to see it, either. She had imagined him exploding out there, and it chilled her to her core. She didn't want to see it, but she knew she could detach herself from that sort of thing better than her sisters.

Ryouga leaned against the wall; near the alien corpses she'd had him pile up earlier. Back then, she had berated him for wanting to dump them into space, and now she was going to do just that to him. It didn't matter that the aliens had followed him to Nerima. It hadn't been his intention, and everyone knew it. No one would blame him. Nabiki doubted anyone would even talk about it.

It was the fault of those damn… things.

The door opened, and Soun looked inside the room. "Akane thinks we're almost ready."

Ranma, who also stood nearby, gave Ryouga a look. The lost boy just shrugged, pushing off the wall. His right hand was still wrapped up, but he had indicated that it wouldn't matter. He wouldn't be using his hands anyway.

"Time to go," he said with suicidal certainty.

Behind him, Ranma looked on with an expression Nabiki couldn't quite place. Ryouga didn't hesitate as he walked up to the door leading to the airlock. Nabiki opened the door, and saw him make the last two steps.

"Hibiki." She wasn't sure why she said his last name, instead of the more playful Ryo-Baby. No: she knew. She had started using the nickname to try and make the situation more comfortable and upbeat. Now, she wanted him to take what she said seriously. He inclined his head in her direction, but said nothing.

"Ten seconds, and then it's over," she assured him. "Don't try and hold your breath."

"I know," he said, tonelessly.

"And…" she added, hastily. "We still have to pay you back for your help. I still have to. Remember that, ok?"

He blinked at her, faced forward, and took two more small steps. The door behind him, between them, closed with a hiss. Like before, when he had first entered the ship, it was perfectly silent within the enclosed space of the airlock. The only sound was his breathing, and the faint beating of his heart. Ryouga found it almost relaxing, content as he was with it being his tomb.

Inside, there were two small square windows (more of the alien metal, made transparent through some unknown means) to either side of the final door. It was somewhat difficult to see them from the other side of the inner airlock door, but now he could see the world beyond very clearly. A resigned feeling slowly spread through his body, filling it with warmth, and a peculiar heaviness.

It was his heavy heart.

Stepping back from the windows, and the ship's entryway, he began building his energy. It had never been very difficult for him to summon enough heavy _ki_ to form the _shishi hokodan_. His _Jyusenkyou_ curse, his directional problems, his loneliness, his chronically lost family, his screwed up childhood, it all went into his heart, where it turned black and sickly green, before building up in his abdomen. Then, he reached for his darker memories, building up to that most recent event only a few days ago.

Memories of fear, of rejection, of self-loathing.

He reflexively set his legs, braced himself, and felt his _ki_ manifest as an aura. It was more intense than he usually kept it at, and felt like pinpricks up and down his arms, along his spine, and down his face. His legs buckled slightly at the increase in weight, as the air around him became charged. This was the force that had nearly brought the inhumanly strong Musk warrior, Lime, to his knees moments before being crushed by the full power of the perfect _shishi hokodan_.

He closed his eyes, and waited.

It was not long. He felt it, and heard it, when the outer door opened – the rush of wind, and the sudden chill. It was cold and fast and nearly caught him by surprise. Ryouga had kept his mouth open while he waited, and the air was ripped from his lungs, his chest constricting painfully. His heart began to beat faster from a rush of adrenalin, and Ryouga tried not to let the flashes of pain distract him. Instead, he found and seized that last and most painful of memories.

Akari.

One, one thousand.

Ryouga felt his feet leave the ground. He had not counted on this. He was going to be sucked out into space, into oblivion. He couldn't let this happen, not before he unleashed the lion's roar, and did what he had promised to save the others. His arms splayed out, but of course there was nothing to hold onto. Not immediately.

Outside the airlock and inside the ship, Nabiki gasped, as Ryouga flew towards the open doorway. He was glowing black and green, burning _ki_ like flames filling the room. Behind her, Ranma (who had to keep count) also sucked in a sharp intake of air. Neither had seen the _shishi hokodan_ form yet, and neither had any desire to see Ryouga take a space dive that would not only kill him, but also ruin their best chance for changing the ship's course.

Two, one thousand.

Ryouga's hands hit the sides of the door, stopping him halfway outside the ship. He could feel the ice on his skin, the pressure on his eyes, the boiling and then freezing of water on his tongue and in his mouth, and the rush of the last of the room's air come up from behind. With no air in his lungs, he let his body go slack, his mind empty of emotion, and lion within him roared.

The room exploded with light, forcing Ranma and Nabiki to squint and look away. White became black and green, as a column of ethereal fire filled the chambers of the airlock, pouring out the only opening like a deluge. Air molecules, already charged with _ki_, flared up and Ryouga's back hit the inner door. Still, the incredible alien metal held, without the slightest buckling, as the perfect _shishi hokodan_ continued out into space.

Behind closed eyes, Ryouga could see Akari, just beyond a field of flowers and a familiar river separating the living from the dead. This was the river Sanzu; he remembered it well from his last visit here, when the Musk Warrior Lime had brought him to the brink of death. Akari was with Katsunishiki, her prized pet sumo pig, and behind her he could see other dim shapes, indistinct but vaguely familiar. He smiled at her, and began to walk, feeling warmer. So much warmer. The last time he had come here, Akane and his unrequited love for her had held him back.

Now he knew. He knew he could leave her to Ranma. It wasn't just what she wanted; it was what she had fought for, that day on _Jusendo_. She was with Ranma, and finally, Ryouga could leave it at that. His nightmare of that day, the one of her and Ranma together after his death, was now a certainty he had long come to expect and accept. It would not bring him back from his final rest.

This time, he would pass on, and go just where he wanted to.

He stopped, just a moment, in front of the river. There was no boat, but when he stepped onto the surface of the water, he didn't fall in. So: he could walk across. He took another step, feeling lighter and warmer. Akari was looking up at him now, eyes free of pain and fear. Still, she looked sad. Why? Was it his fault?

"Ryouga-sama…" she said, softly.

"Akari-chan, I'm sorry." He gave her a wan smile. "I'm so sorry I couldn't save you. I didn't want to make you wait, and I'm sorry for that too. But I'm here now."

"Ryouga-sama, don't…" she said, as he made ready to advance over the water of the river that separated them.

"Akari-chan? What's wrong?" he asked his voice also soft. "Please tell me, so hat I can fix it."

She looked down, her right arm partway around Katsunishiki's neck. "I don't want you to die, Ryouga-sama."

He inclined his head, in an almost amused fashion. "My life… isn't something I'd beg for. Not now."

Akari looked up at him, and now there were tears in her eyes. "Please go back. Please live, Ryouga-sama! There are people back there you have to protect! And you made a vow: that what happened to me, would never happen to anyone else."

"I… I can't keep that vow." Ryouga clenched his fists. Why did she want him to go back without her? What else did he have to live for? "I'm…I'm not strong enough. Please don't hold me to that vow!"

"Go back, Ryouga-sama. Go back, and live." She gave him another innocent smile as she started to fade away, and as the world started to grow more distant. "I want nothing more than to see you happy. As happy as being with you made me..."

"Akari-chan… no!" Ryouga reached out to her, as she drifted back, into the shadows beyond. He felt himself being pulled back, away from her. Away from his grandparents. Away from the peace he had always subconsciously desired. His feet skidded, and he fought against it only for a few seconds, before letting himself fall ever back into the cursed land of the living.

* * *

Ranma left Akane for last. Soun, Nabiki, and Kasumi all floated in their pods, suspended in orange solution. They looked conscious for the moment, and Soun in particular seemed to be looking away from them intently, but Ranma tried to ignore the other Tendos for the moment. He also tried to ignore Ryouga, who floated unconscious in Ranma's former pod, his skin bluish and bruised, his fingernails black.

"Ranma…" Akane leaned in close. She wanted to tell him something; and he suspected that he knew what it was.

"Akane," he cut her off. "I feel the same way."

She hugged him, and Ranma fought to keep from blushing. There was nothing more to do now, so Ranma let her stay in his arms as long as she wanted. Not that he was complaining, or anything. Gentle gestures from his fiancée were still somewhat rare, and Ranma secretly savored every one.

He wanted to kiss her, but was too shy to do it.

So he enjoyed what he had, at the moment, without risking anything she'd take the wrong way. Besides, she knew how he felt. He had yelled it out to the world after the fight with Saffron, when he had thought her dead in his arms. It was just so much harder to say it with her awake, and looking at him, into him, searching.

"Hey, I'll see you in a couple hours, ok?" he whispered, and felt her nod against the side of his face. It felt good. Better than he'd ever admit.

"Be careful, Ranma. Good luck."

It was the words he had wanted to hear from her. A part of him still expected her to say, 'I'm a martial artist, too!' and demand that she stay with him as the ship plowed into the earth at who knew how many kilometers per second. She had pouted about being treated so delicately, but he suspected the horrors and shocks of the last few hours were still having a strong affect on her.

An overestimation of oneself here meant death.

"Don't worry 'bout me!" he said, and gave her his favorite cocky grin. She backed up into the pod, and Ranma reached up to close it. No sooner did the transparent material close her off from him, than the tube filled with the viscous orange fluid. Akane's hand pressed against the clear material, and Ranma covered it with his own, briefly, before heading for the bridge.

Now, he was alone.

The ship seemed to take on a more ominous air, and Ranma cleared his mind by checking the new course projection. Sure enough, they were still plotted to hit the edge of South America, a little bit inland from the South Pacific. Leaving the command room, he could see that the world was getting closer. Blue and white seemed to be everywhere, without a trace of the sparkling black background he had grown somewhat used to.

Then the ship began to shake, as it hit some more substantial resistance. Ranma had seen the American Space Shuttle, and had watched enough quasi-scifi anime to know that this was the beginning of atmospheric re-entry. Even as it plummeted, becoming engulfed in a halo of bright red and orange, Ranma distantly wondered what it looked like from back on Earth.

Was someone down there wishing upon a shooting star?

* * *

"Hotel One reports no xenos, repeat: no xeno activity in the northeast quarter."

"That's a negative All Angles?"

"Negative All Angles, India One. I'll come around with Golf Squad to back you up. Good hunting indoors."

"Will do. Entering now."

A door opened, light cutting through the dark. A pair of round green circles moved through the dark, superimposed on top of a large outline. Behind it moved another pair, and then another, swiftly and with practiced ease. Another door opened, and heavy boots, mottled black and green over a metal surface, made hardly a sound as they carried their owner forward. A gauntleted hand went up, signaling the others to pause. It made a hand sign, and motioned to the left.

"Sectoids. Dead. No contact. Looks like five or six bodies. No plasma scarring or burns. No ballistic trauma. They almost look… cut up. They're in a rough pile, southwest quadrant of the Examination Room."

"Five or six? That's all?"

"Suzette - Anything on PAWS?"

"No contact on PAWS BVI. No motion forward or above us."

The voices, three male and one female, were not heard by any outside the armored combat suits. The leader, India One, motioned forward, and they continued to the next door. They proceeded with caution, a flexible tube scanning to the left and right of the door before the armored warrior stepped through, a large weapon held at the shoulder and close to his body. They took up positions, two covering one route, a third by the door, and two in the opposite direction, away from the lift.

"East Wing secured. Reactor intact. Confirmed civilian casualties _in vitro_. Seven. Looks like four female, three male."

"John. Secure the lift."

One of the armored figures quickly moved forward, while the other two advanced more cautiously. Two faintly glowing green eyes, set into a faceplate under a heavy looking helmet, paused to look over the pods filled with orange colored fluid.

"This is India One. Looks like we've got survivors: three female, two male, all adults. Oriental features. One looks pretty badly injured. All appear to be fully suspended and unconscious."

"Japanese?"

"Could be."

"Fukida could tell for sure."

"Don't ask me how. Japanese, Korean, Chinese. They all look the same."

"Cut the chatter. I want three on the second level: John, Suzette, Andrew. Now. Sweep it clean."

India One watched the four unconscious civilians. It was highly unusual to find survivors on an Abductor, unless the ship was stormed before it took off, of course. Plus, these people were wearing clothes, if somewhat makeshift. Sectoids almost never loaded people without stripping them first. And why were these people alive and the others not? A minute later, there was another surprising report.

"Command Deck! We have another survivor. Human. Oriental features. He's been tossed around, pretty beat up, but he's alive."

"No more xenos?"

"No contacts, sir. She's empty."

"Both reactors are intact. She's still got two full tanks of One Fifteen. This ship didn't run out of power, that's for sure."

"Is that so?" India One asked, and smiled behind his faceplate. "All right. Round up these civvies and prep them for flight. I guess we'll just have to ask nicely to figure out what happened here."


	8. El Dorado Part II

It was not an imposing office, nor was it particularly large. The walls were an imaginative shade of dirty white, and lacked any sort of interesting ambiance. One side of the rectangular room had a large map of South America, four feet wide and high, in topographic and geo-political relief. Nearby, an analog clock ticked away. There was a plain oak door leading to a side room, and a handful of framed credentials, the official-looking but tiny text impossible to read from anything more than a couple feet away.

Positioned near the back of the room, dead center in the middle, was a large wooden desk dominated by a neat pile of papers on one side, and a flat screen computer monitor on the other. To the right of the desk, a metallic gray filing cabinet stood, a number of books stacked and arranged neatly on the top. A small fan spun slowly from the ceiling, supporting a trio of energy-efficient lights. Three plain-looking chairs, made of utilitarian metal and plastic, were at different angles, all facing the desk.

There was really nothing to occupy oneself with in the room while waiting.

Normally, there was something to stare at, or admire. Many powerful men and women adorned their workspaces with awards, or pictures, or newspaper clippings. Some had models or souvenirs hanging around. There was nothing like that here. Behind the desk, sat a similarly unassuming man, in his mid-forties. He seemed to be reviewing a report, leisurely looking through it and making over exaggerated gestures every time he turned the pages.

A plaque on the desk, set in gold and wood, said:

Eli Perrikos. Lt.Cmdr. UNETCO.

True to his workplace, the Lieutenant Commander was not the most physically impressive of men. Even standing, he was only halfway to six feet tall from five, and sitting didn't make him any more imposing. His hair seemed a little too sparse and with a touch too much gray. His left hand shook slightly from time to time, the bioshop replacement that had been grown for him never having been fully accepted into the community of organs that was the human body. No medals adorned his black uniform, nor any insignia save for those indicating his rank.

Sitting opposite him, in one of the less-than-comfortable metal and plastic chairs, was a younger man in a similar uniform. This man had a full head of black hair, cut short and combed back, and his face shaved smooth. His rank was less impressive than that of the man in whose office he waited. He was a Captain, but unlike his senior officer, he had a bold "PSI" emblazoned under his shoulder insignia, and a small pyramid with an eye in the middle pinned to his collar.

Finally, the Lieutenant Commander put down the report, and cupped his hands in front of himself as he leaned back in his (much more comfortable) chair. In the year and a half Captain Nivelles had worked under Eli Perrikos, he had become well aware of the older man's conservative approach to situations. Perrikos was a stickler for research and details, more so than strategy. He was generous in giving people under him the time needed to accomplish a goal, but he was extremely strict and unforgiving if those deadlines were pushed back. He didn't like trouble, and didn't generally look for it.

"Interesting," the said, and he reached for the small stack of papers to the left. He took the ones from the top, and spread them out neatly on his desk before him. Nivelles could see, upside down, the names on top of the files.

Saotome, Ranma

Tendo, Soun

Tendo, Nabiki

Tendo, Kasumi

Tendo, Akane

Hibiki, Ryouga

"One is almost tempted to write this whole thing off as some delusional fantasy," Perrikos continued. "Except… that their memories all synch, don't they?"

"As it says in my report, sir. Questioning, and level three psionic data mining, indicate that the events occurred exactly as described. None of the individuals show signs of alien imprints, or falsified memories. One does show signs of mental tampering, but it is the standard attempt by the aliens to suppress actual memories; in this case those of two previous abductions."

"Work done by an Ethereal, no less." The Commander's eyes wandered down to the reports. "Yet, that individual regained his memories on his own."

"It is remarkable, for someone without psionic training," Captain Nivelles admitted. "However, having spent time reading their surface thoughts while they were being questioned, I can personally confirm their mental architecture. Well, that of the three men, at least. All show signs of self-organization and networked EBMs – Ego Barrier Matrixes."

"Very well. Assuming that all this is real, and not some imprinted alien fabrication… we have a pair of powerful TKs on our hands, who know about our little visitor problem, and who we cannot reliably mentally influence. Your report states that you believe you can manufacture fake memories that will last up to six months in them?"

"Yes, sir." Nivelles nodded. "All aliens, even Ethereals, have some difficulty in subtly manipulating the human mind, just as we have great difficulty doing likewise to the many species of alien invaders. Even working on a fellow human, with a familiar mental architecture, imposing false memories or subduing memories themselves… it is much more difficult than forced emotional channeling, mental domination, popping a blood vessel, or burning out a frontal lobe."

"Not a viable option, is it?" The other man asked rhetorically. "Especially when we have to return them to Japan. This is why I don't like extraterritorial business, Captain. Which is ironic, really, considering my position."

The Lieutenant Commander, the man in charge of Terrestrial Defense: South America, sighed. This sort of situation was not totally unique. South America, since the beginning of the war, had been a hotbed for alien abduction and harvesting missions. Still, it was largely a sideshow compared to the fighting over the wealthier countries, especially in Europe and Asia.

Still, the aliens came to South America regularly, if unspectacularly. Over the years, there had been more than a few occasions when XCOM had come across survivors in alien bases, if not ships. When they cracked open ABS-12, in the mountains of Bolivia, there had been a dozen 'ongoing experimental subjects' liberated. None who survived had given the PSIs much trouble, however. Last he heard they were living their lives, none-the-wiser to what had happened.

"They have some very impressive abilities, sir," Nivelles responded, taking up their defense. "They took out several Sectoids, literally hand to hand. And their telekinetic techniques – this 'Lion Roar Shot' and 'Pride of the Fierce Tiger' – this is something we could study and put to use."

"That much is obvious, Captain. However, based on these reports from the Tokyo Office, these people are agitators and troublemakers… and I'm not just talking about normal records, either: school, medical, professional. I mean Police reports. Even the JSDF! I see here reports of wanton destruction of property, both public and private, repeated and un-chastised disciplinary problems in school, suspected theft and/or destruction of religious and cultural artifacts, a formal complaint from the PRC, damage done to several national parks…"

The younger man stiffened at the list of accusations, unaware of them himself.

"I dare say that these two… young men are borderline criminal. The older man also has a police record, which involves numerous references to theft, breaking and entering, destruction of public and private property, assisting a known felon – some old man named Happosai – and sexual deviance in the collection of women's underwear, of all things! More recently, there have been complaints about grifting."

The Commander let out another sigh, as he quickly reviewed the other reports.

"As for the girls," he then concluded. "They seem harmless enough, except for this Akane character, but they're also useless to us!"

"Shall I prep a team for mental insertion, sir?" Nivelles asked. It was somewhat distasteful duty, but it wouldn't be the first time he'd done it. XCOM was a top secret organization, and even as much as their new visitors had been kept in the dark, they knew far too much.

"Yes... Prepare an insertion team, but keep the actual operation on standby." Lt Commander Eli Perrikos tapped his index fingers together, and leaned further back in his chair. "I'm going to give Noriko a call. Maybe she'll take in these strays. In the meantime, keep them under guard. Dismissed, Captain."

Alejandro Nivelles stood, and saluted. "Yes, sir."

And left. As he did, the young Captain dearly hoped that the Far East Asia Branch would take up the Commander's offer. Alejandro knew a number of skilled and powerful Telekineticists, or TKs, ones that could even do their thing without the aid of a psi-amp, but nothing approaching what the two young martial artists from Nerima could do. The Captain's instincts told him that they were important, and if there was one thing a PSI trusted, it was his instincts.

* * *

The accommodations were actually very good, and their hosts seemed very generous. Akane felt more than a little guilty in not trusting them. Drying her hair, she checked the time on a thin digital clock radio. It looked very much like something out of Nabiki's 'Sharper Image' catalogues. The rest of the room, however, looked somewhat quaint. The walls and floor were a nice rose-colored wood, the carpet was a dark shade of brown, and even the drapes had a relaxed earthy hue.

There was a large dresser handy, and a closet with a meager (but apparently free) selection of clothes. The bed was queen sized, and set in an expensive looking wooden frame. She had quickly discovered that a good-sized flat screen high definition television was concealed behind two wooden panels in the wall, and it worked with the compact controller originally left on the dresser. The walls were decorated with pictures of exotic looking birds, including one of a very pretty hummingbird (a Chestnut Breasted Coronet). Of course, Akane couldn't read the name, which was in English she could pronounce but not understand, but it looked good.

All in all, it was a very nice room.

And the pictures were appropriate, too, since they had been told that they were guests at the privately owned Grant-Andean Bird Sanctuary. Certainly, that seemed to be the truth; the room had even come with a book about the 'Bird-watching in Eastern Peru.' Still, there were several things that she found suspicious, besides her unusual arrival in the country two days ago. The lodge she was in seemed to be the only one in the area. The other buildings were off limits, and had such benign names as 'Climatological Laboratory,' 'VIP Lodging,' and 'Enclosed Helicopter Pad.' The latter was especially odd, because it looked a lot like a big warehouse, and it had a very wide set of doors that opened up to the only road into the compound.

Then there were the armed guards…

Bird Sanctuaries, even in South America, normally did not hire armed guards in black uniforms. Did they? Akane doubted it. She also doubted that they were in the business of giving free room and board to people, or questioning them about being in an alien spaceship. The truth was obvious enough: these guys were Peruvian Military. Which brought up another wave of questions, about what they knew, what they were doing, and what they planned to do.

Akane fixed her hair (it was still slightly damp) and put on a cotton shirt after the usual undergarments. All must have been high quality cotton, because they were extremely soft and smooth – almost silky. They were also a little big for her, which led Akane to speculate that someone had donated it, and that its original owner was a couple inches taller than the Japanese girl. Still, slightly baggy clothes were a nice change of pace from being nearly naked. Akane saw a dress, too, but passed it over for a pair of plain brown cargo pants.

She left her room. Unlike hotels, which used magnetic cards as keys, these rooms all had old-fashioned bolt locks. Not that she could have locked her door if she even wanted to, once she left it – they had not been issued personal copies of their room keys. Walking down the hall, past identical looking doors, and framed maps of the Bird Preserve on the opposite side of the wall, she passed Nabiki's, Kasumi's, and her father's doors. She knew they were already downstairs, eating breakfast.

Nabiki had announced that she was leaving while Akane was in the shower. The rooms all seemed to be partnered, so that they shared a single bathroom each, and the group had been set up in alphabetical order. Akane idly wondered, while she walked, if Nabiki would try and steal the complimentary soaps and towels they had been given. None had any identifying marks, like normal hotel stuff would, so if she did it would be out of pure cheapness. Or habit. Or some combination of the two.

At Ranma's door, Akane knocked to see if he was in.

"Ranma?" she asked, not receiving an immediate response. She knocked a few more times. "Ranma?"

Still no response. Then, the next door down opened, and Ryouga looked out, in the wrong direction at first, and then at her. He let out a sigh of obvious relief, and stepped out into the hallway. He wasn't wearing his usual clothes, instead sporting a plain western shirt, button down, and light brown khakis. Only his bandannas were the same.

"Akane-san. Thank the gods!" He clenched a fist; his still unhurt left one, and held it up to his chin. "That Ranma! He left without…ah, helping… me downstairs!"

"So he left without waiting for me, too?" Akane gave the door a sour look, but walked past it to her friend. "Well, I'm heading downstairs; do you want to come with me?"

"I'd be happy to! Thank you, Akane-san!" He gave her a polite bow, and fell in step right behind her. Akane always thought it was so sad, Ryouga's directional problems. It must have been an endless source of shame and disparagement, plus a mark against his pride, to have to ask directions all the time. Or worse: ask to be led everywhere. Akane had no problem asking for directions, of course, but doing so more than once, in an attempt to get to the same location… she couldn't imagine how frustrating and demeaning that could be.

"How's the hand?" she asked, as they walked. Behind her, Ryouga held his right hand, now in a proper white bandage and splint, in his left palm.

"It… it is healing very well, Akane-san," he replied, his voice subdued, like most of the time when they talked. "Thank you for asking."

"When do you think it'll be better?" They walked down a flight of steps, to the Lodge on the first floor.

"Five days perhaps." Ryouga then amended, "Maybe a week."

"Why?" She really wanted him to talk, to interact with others. He had been brooding in his room for the last twenty-four hours. For a while, everyone had thought that he'd wandered off and gotten lost.

"It should not have broken in the first place. The _bakusai tenketsu_ didn't fail completely, back when… Anyway, it sort of caused a backlash, I think. This sort of thing has never happened to me before, and Cologne never mentioned it either. It was that accursed metal… it just didn't have any breaking points. How could it not have breaking points?"

Akane slowed their walk. She saw the others now, eating breakfast at a table. They were sitting on the floor even though there were couches and chairs nearby. She steered Ryouga in their direction while he talked.

"I thought living creatures didn't have breaking points?"

"No. They have them, Akane-san. Sort of. There just doesn't seem to be a way to use them." Ryouga tilted his head, as he thought of how to better explain what he meant. Luckily, martial arts was a subject he could speak of that overcame his normal shyness around her, and most others.

"The breaking point," he explained, after a few seconds. "It is not an actual point, like a place, on something. Instead, it is… um… a feeling. A resonance. An understanding. Through it, one sees the flaws in a material. The _bakusai tenketsu_ then gives power to those flaws, and amplifies them. The faster one does it, the more the result is like an explosion, and the more _ki _one uses, the wider the area it affects."

"Hey, you guys finally made it, huh?" Ranma leaned back so he was looking at them upside down.

"No thanks to you, Ranma!" Ryouga growled.

"Hey, don't be that way. I was gonna go and get you in a couple minutes." Ranma smirked. "I knew you wouldn't be going anywhere, after all."

Ryouga stiffened at that. He seemed about to retort, in a less than witty fashion, when Akane took him by the arm. Normally, when she did something like this, his whole body went rigid, and he smiled vacantly. This time, Akane felt his muscles tense in a different way. He didn't say anything, but she eased up. She had hoped that she could cheer him up, like she always was able to do, but this time something seemed wrong.

"Let's go get something to eat, ne?" Akane asked, dragging him to the small self-serve buffet. Ranma watched them go with half-lidded eyes, before grumbling and getting back to what was left of his food.

"The blue potatoes are very good!" Kasumi chirped, from her position next to her father. Opposite him, Nabiki picked at a large slab of bacon, somewhat wary of the fattiness therein. Akane and Ryouga returned with parts of a continental breakfast, and a bowl of cereal filled to capacity with brown cornflakes.

They didn't see any of the other guests around, of which there were at least two. In fact, the main building was surprisingly sparsely populated. There was no reception desk of any sort, and it was not handled like any hotel or hostel. People came and went with a strange sense of purpose, even if that purpose was leisure. The six of them had a free hand to go anywhere in or around the main building, and to use any of the amenities, but they had been warned not to stray too far outside.

They couldn't even go bird watching, it seemed.

And they certainly couldn't get any sort of outside line, or place a call to Nerima. Their rooms all had a phone jack in the wall, but no actual telephone. It was sort of like being in a minimum-security prison, Nabiki supposed. Could they have run for it? She knew the answer was yes. Even burdened by having to carry Nabiki and Kasumi, the group could have gotten past the (electrified) fence, and maybe the guards, too. But then where would they go? And how long would it be before someone caught up with them?

So, in the end, they did what they were told and stayed put. It wasn't as if they were being mistreated, really. Even the questioning the day before had been relatively tame. The questions had been straightforward, and never repeated. There had been no intense lights, no veiled threats, no 'good cop/bad cop' like on TV. Two men had come to their rooms, wearing plain clothes. One had asked questions, in Japanese, and the other had written down notes on a clipboard.

"As nice as this is…" Nabiki mused, as she poked at her bacon with her fork. "It isn't exactly how I imagined my first overseas vacation going."

"Didn't you always want to go to Las Vegas?" Akane asked, while she ate. The utensils were a bit awkward, but straightforward in application: poke, spear, lift, and eat. Cutting most things was easy enough, just using the side of the fork.

"Any place exciting!" Nabiki complained. "Being locked up in a Bird Sanctuary by a bunch of paramilitary types on the other hand… did you ever actually look through that book we all seem to have in our rooms? I can't read a word of it, but there are like four hundred pictures. And half of them look the same. And the television – every channel is just people yelling nonsense! We need to call a lawyer, or something. They can't keep us here…."

"Ryouga," Soun asked, when Nabiki's complaining died down to a quiet grumble. "Did you sleep well… last night?"

It was an odd question, and it caught the lost boy by surprise, especially because Soun's tone of voice was not concerned, or even curious. It was as if the older man suspected something, but needed a bit more proof to back it up.

Ryouga finished chewing a bit of croissant, and answered, "Actually, I did. I've slept like a log the last two days. You'd think, after everything… that it'd be impossible to have a good night's sleep ever again."

Soun nodded. "Ranma?"

The pigtailed boy shrugged. "Yeah. I slept pretty well. It helped that there was no half-ton panda trying to roll over me in his sleep, or an ancient pervert waiting to splash me come morning. I went out like a light."

Soun then turned to his eldest daughter. "Kasumi?"

"Well…" Kasumi responded, a little shyly. "I suppose I also slept very well. The bed was quite comfortable, and we were all very tired from before. Maybe that was it?"

"Now that I think about it, it is rather unusual," Nabiki added in. "You know when you sleep, and you just wake up? Like you haven't had any dreams, but you know you've had a good night's sleep? That's happened twice now."

"Same here," Akane spoke up. "Even right after I wake up, I can't remember dreaming anything. It isn't like I've forgotten what happened either, back on that ship."

"Everything else feels normal." Ranma stood up, and sat on one of the couches nearby. "It wasn't strange, like on that ship. If anything, it feels a bit like Nerima."

"Ranma's right," Ryouga said, with obvious displeasure. "There's a feeling you get in Nerima. I think it is from all the martial artists in the area. This is a little different, though. More like… a Buddhist monastery. There's a sort of tranquility here. A sort of purpose. More than just the energy of Nerima, which is just the opposite."

"Sounds like a bunch of religious mumbo jumbo to me." Nabiki waved her hand in the air, dismissively. "You know what it is? It's the fact that we're surrounded by armed guards, probably Peruvian Special Forces, who obviously know about these aliens. Hence, we feel safer, hence, we sleep better."

"Hello!" a voice said in English, and then in Japanese, "Konnichiwa!"

The greeting came from the door leading outside. Two men walked in, both of whom the Nerima crew recognized. The taller of the two, the man with blonde hair, was the one who had been keeping notes during their individual interrogations. The shorter was the one who had actually asked them questions. Both wore similar jungle-camo themed pants, the former having a black shirt with a small red shield over the right breast, while the latter had a more festive shirt with floral colors in random patterns. Both also had sunglasses, which they removed when they stepped indoors.

"How is everyone doing?" the shorter man asked - his Japanese was much better than the other man's, but possessed of an unusual accent. He also looked to be of Japanese ancestry, but with darker skin, and slightly rounder eyes. His shirt also had a symbol, which was much more recognizable, representative as it was of Brazilian soccer. Which explained both his mixed name, and accent.

"We are well, Ribeiro-san," Soun, as the oldest, spoke for the group. "However, we would like to know when we can place a call to Tokyo."

"Damn right!" Ranma blurted out. "When're we gonna find out what happened back there?"

Nabiki looked like she was about to say something, too, but she held her tongue.

"Well, I can't give you a definite time," the shorter man, Fukida Ribeiro, explained amiably. "We're arranging transport for you back to Japan, but there's paperwork and… other issues to clear up first. But I know it must be boring cooped up in here. There's a small village a few kilometers to the southeast, how about I drive you there and you can get some souvenirs or something? This part of Peru is well known for its native arts and crafts. They make some very nice clothes using local pima cotton, rugs out of alpaca wool. My wife says the pottery is also quite beautiful."

"We don't have any money," Nabiki spoke, and she didn't sound happy about that particular part of their situation.

"That's quite alright," Ribeiro responded with a smile. "As long as it isn't outlandishly expensive, we'd be happy to make it our treat. As a way of making up for keeping you here against your wishes."

"Anything is better than sitting around here." Akane wasn't as bored as her sister, Nabiki, but it was true: there was nothing to watch, read, or do, and no one to talk to.

"Well…" Kasumi also seemed amenable. "It couldn't hurt."

"If I'm not paying, I'm always game!" And that was Nabiki, unsurprisingly. From his seat on the couch, Ranma rolled his eyes in disgust. Ryouga similarly had no interest in going to some village to get trinkets and rugs, especially since he or Ranma would inevitably end up carrying them. And, of course, he didn't want to get lost. Not in the middle of South America.

His Spanish was simply atrocious.

"If my girls are going I will accompany them," Soun said, with no small amount of resignation.

"Whatever. Pass." Ranma put his hands behind his head, and got comfortable.

Ryouga crossed his arms over his chest. "I think I'd also rather stay here."

The others talked a little longer, retrieved a few pairs of sandals, and soon enough they were gone. Ryouga finished his food, slowly, while Ranma relaxed. Only a few minutes later, the blonde man returned. The expression on his face was different, much more intense. Still, as far as they could tell, he didn't know more than a smattering of Japanese. For a few seconds, he just stood there, watching the two younger men.

"Saotome, Ranma. Hibiki, Ryouga. I knew the two of you would stick around. In fact, I was counting on it," he finally said, and smiled.

His Japanese was more than passable, though his tone of voice was unpracticed. It was almost as if he had learned the language, but never actually used it before. The two martial artists assessed the man. There was something unusual there. Not quite the bearing of another practitioner of the art, but something close to it.

"Can we help you, Mr…?" Ryouga asked. He had far more experience talking to strangers than Ranma did, for obvious reasons.

"Nivelles." The Spaniard inclined his head politely. "Alejandro Nivelles. And yes… yes, you can…"


	9. El Dorado Part III

It was a prison without bars, a jail without a lock or a key. It was far worse, far more insidious. Cologne, Matriarch of the Chinese Amazons, had an alien in her mind. Sometimes one, sometimes two, but the Presence was always there. Always. There was nothing to see, nothing to feel, nothing to know. Only that she was not alone, even in her thoughts.

Instead, she tried to be As Nothing – empty of thoughts and passions.

It was a fairly straightforward mental exercise, really, to think of nothing. To be as nothing. Yet, never for so long, or under such conditions. The Presences prodded at her mind, questioning and promising. In the end, it had been simply a matter of time. The lead Presence allowed her a measure of self-awareness, and suddenly Cologne remembered how to see.

Everything was dark, save for the entity that towered over her physically and emotionally weakened body. It seemed to rise forever, a tower of shimmering gold-orange, the weave of the fabric like canyons. Far above her, shrouded by the glimmering cloak, Cologne could see two hollows where eyes should, by all rights, have been. For such a creature, eyes were irrelevant. It didn't need to see her. It simply knew where she was, what state she was in, past the obviousness of the flesh and into the hidden recesses of her soul.

YES

Cologne tried to move, tried to will her _ki_ to give her frail body power.

FINALLY

Her body might as well have been a mile away.

BROKEN

It peeled her mind like an onion, stripping away the defenses and the primal desires she used to augment her waning consciousness. It flayed off the memories and thoughts that it found to its liking, and discarded the rest. Cologne tried, exhausted almost beyond description, beyond the physical concept of the word, to hold close the last of her secrets. The ones on which so many lives depended. The assault slowed, but only for a moment, before resuming with a cruel ferocity.

BROKEN

MORE

WHERE

Cologne's mind stretched to the point of tearing.

WHERE

NOW

WHERE

WHERE

Another of Them appeared, suddenly. Hollow Eyes seemed distracted, and faced the Other. Cologne could hear their thoughts, like distant thunder, but no emotions. Nothing more complex than hunger, a deep hunger like the maw of some unfathomable chasm. After a few moments, Hollow Eyes floated away, and Cologne's vision faded to blackness once more.

CLOSE

SOON

BROKEN

No sooner was he/she/it gone, than another Presence filled the void. It was smaller, weaker, but no less tenacious. Another joined it, and the two dutifully resumed the assault on the Amazon Matriarch's mind. She held together, but only barely. Another, and Other, poked and prodded, and promised and seduced, but Cologne knew the Hollow Eyes were behind them, waiting, lurking.

If it had ever been in doubt before, now there was no mistake. She was almost out of time. They knew almost everything, though perhaps (she hoped) they did not understand it. They devoured knowledge and memories, but such things would not give them all that they wanted. Soon, she would die, and the ordeal would be over. She only hoped her body would give out before her mind and her spirit did.

If not, her weakness would be the death of everything she had lived for.

* * *

Ranma and Ryouga had not been this far from the main building before, the former because he had no desire to be shot at, and the latter because he hadn't gotten lost yet. They were near what looked like a recreational area. Sure enough, there was a spartan basketball court, a path leading to an outdoor pool, and a firing range. Given that the lodge had less than sixteen rooms, it seemed to boast a fair number of amenities. 

"So, Nivelles-san. If you don't mind me asking, where are you from?"

"Cartagena, Hibiki-san. That is where I grew up, but I have not been there in many years."

"I… see," Ryouga said, tentatively, understanding all too well what that was like.

Ranma cleared his throat. "What are we doing out here? I thought we weren't supposed to wander off?"

Nivelles smiled at that. "Some things have changed. But before we get into that, I'd like to see something: those martial arts techniques you… mentioned. The Lion Roar Bullet, and the Pride of the Fierce Tiger?"

"The _shishi hokodan_?" Ryouga asked, his voice now a little more wary. "Why do you want to see that?"

Ranma felt the same way, but didn't feel the need to ask, content as he was to let the lost boy talk with the blonde haired _gaijin_. A martial artist's secret techniques were normally well guarded, hence why they were secret techniques in the first place. They were designed only to be used either as a last resort, or in a duel to the death (after which your secret techniques would be a secret again – dead men telling no tales, after all). As rivals, Ranma and Ryouga were more liberal with them when it came to each other. Even with all the threats, both boys knew neither would really kill the other.

Probably. At least Ranma had never had any intention to kill Ryouga. He liked to think that the lost boy, for all his threats, felt the same way. After all, he had had several opportunities to kill off 'the bane of his existence, and the source of all his woes,' yet had never done so. Mousse and Kuno, on the other hand, Ranma was not so sure of. They had ganged up to attack him at his weakest, after all, so who could say with any certainty that they would pull a potentially killing blow? Mousse, at least, had saved his life in the fight with Herb, so perhaps there was some trust and camaraderie between them after all.

"Well, how about a trade?" the Spaniard suggested as they walked towards the outdoor firing range. "If you show me your special technique, I'll show you both one of mine. Fair?"

"You're a martial artist?" Ranma asked, his attention now fully on the potential bargain to be made. The Saotome Anything Goes Style, the _Musabetsu Kakuto Saotome Ryu_, was predicated on learning, adapting, and improvising on the techniques of other schools.

"In a fashion," Nivelles answered, more than a little cryptically.

"What school?" Ranma pressed, smirking as he thought of a joke. "Let me guess: some sort of Spanish _ninjitsu_?"

The (slightly) older man chuckled. "I used to be very good with Vega, actually. Ah, but games back then had _character_…" He sighed. "No. You could say I have a sort of Special Forces training, though I haven't been at it as long as either of you two."

"I did learn to punch before I could walk," Ranma boasted, sticking his chest out.

"Whatever…" Ryouga grumbled just loud enough for the other two to hear. The three stopped near the leftmost part of the shooting range. The range itself was open air, with a set of distant targets, both humanoid and square, with concentric targeting circles. Most were pretty far off, and several had large holes in them.

"Do either of you think you can hit that one, out there, at a hundred yards? The one missing its head?" Nivelles pointed out to a brown and green humanoid figure, minus that most essential of body parts. Ranma and Ryouga both looked closely at the target, and stole looks at each other as well. Both were thinking the same thing: that they'd never tried to hit anything that far off before.

And that neither wanted to be outdone by the other.

A hundred yards was about a hundred meters. It didn't sound like much, but the _shishi hokodan_ and _moko takabisha_ simply had not been intended for long-range engagement. They didn't propagate well past fifty meters, so they were more medium range as far as _ki_ attacks went. Both men went over their past fights, and tried to remember how their attacks (and other's) behaved at long range. _Ki_ attacks rarely missed in close quarters, and the only two they remembered who had routinely used such techniques at long distance was Herb, the Dragon Prince of the Musk Dynasty, and Saffron, the Lord of the Phoenix, who wielded the incredibly powerful _Tenka Shunmetsu Koukyu Dan_.

"Well?" Alejandro asked. "You don't have to atomize it, just hit it."

"Ranma's technique is just a cheap imitation of my own. He doesn't even have a Perfect version of it," Ryouga said, and cracked his knuckles. "I'll go first."

"Cheap imitation?" Ranma hissed from between clenched teeth. "You know, P-chan, most guys save the gloating for after they _win_ a fight. When was the last time you beat me again? Last year?"

"Huh. Just watch this, Ranma!" Ryouga faced down the range, and held his hands out. During his 'fight' with Sarutoru, he had taken his opponent out with a good sized blast, and managed to do it with enough finesse that he didn't hurt Ukyou, who had been right next to his target. That had been maybe twenty meters. He had used a beam version of the _shishi hokodan_ at the time, instead of a ball, both because he was extremely depressed and because he wanted to make sure to take his opponent out before he could grab Ukyou as a hostage.

Focusing his depression with a mental concentration few could match, channeling it through his spirit and body, a green ball of _ki _sparked to life in between Ryouga's hands. It quickly grew to about the size of a baseball, and then larger, until it became as large as a basketball. Not one for subtlety, if all he had to do was hit the target, he'd just level the entire area. Problem solved! He clenched his fingers slightly, and channeled more energy into the attack, crafting it in his mind's eye.

"There!" He thrust his hands forward. "_Shishi Hokodan_!"

The beam was intense, but quickly lost power downrange. It lanced out for a full second, and Ryouga adjusted his hands (and his aim) slightly to compensate, when he noticed the attack falling short. The coiling mass of green energy rose off the ground, and finally hit the target. Unfortunately, so far off, all it did was shake it violently.

Ryouga lowered his hands and frowned. So much wasted energy…! Still, Nivelles seemed impressed. He whistled appreciatively. "Wow. Impressive to see it firsthand."

"You thought that was impressive? Typical lost boy, sloppily throwing his _ki _around and hoping it hits something." Ranma shook his head and walked up to where Ryouga had stood. His old rival was now backing off to let the pigtailed boy have a try.

"Oh yeah?" Ryouga said between breaths, obviously exerted by his effort. "Still more than you could do!"

"Watch and learn." Ranma set his feet, and held out his hands in a stance similar to Ryouga's. He had watched the lost boy's attack, and he had seen how it 'fell' more than expected about sixty meters off. Ranma wanted to hit it without 'leading' his shot as a beam. Not only couldn't he generally output as much raw _ki_ as Ryouga (a spiral of depression and dark thoughts being inherently easier to draw on than light ones, and confidence), but he wanted it to look good, too.

He wanted to show some finesse.

Ranma remembered well, when he had used the _moko takabisha_ on the central well of Togenkyou Island, and he also remembered all the experimentation he had done to develop the attack from the _shishi hokodan_. His _ki_ was lighter, and it wouldn't fall as quickly towards the earth. Unlike Ryouga, Ranma knew how to do both _ki_ attacks, it was just that his lion's roar was weaker than his tiger's pride. If the 'drop off' range of the _shishi hokodan_ was about sixty meters…

Ranma elevated his hands, and collected his energy into a ball. It was easy. He was already full of confidence, and he knew without a doubt that his plan would work, AND that he'd upstage Ryouga. Oh yes, the more he thought about it, the better he felt, and the more powerful his attack became. It was a much more pleasant circle than Ryouga's depressive spiral into despair.

"_Moko Takabisha_!" Ranma yelled, and the ball shot from his cupped hands like a rocket. It grew larger and more dispersed as it traveled, until it became almost six feet wide. Sure enough, it made a shallow arc just as expected, and hit the target in the legs. Of course, that far off, and that dispersed, the attack didn't do any real damage, but that had never been the point anyway.

Now, Nivelles clapped. "Simply amazing! Both of you! I've never seen anything like it! You use the power of your… _ki_… to excite air molecules, and at the same time you're able to keep those same molecules from flying off in different directions… The physical augmentation I had heard of, but this is something totally new! The blast seems to be primarily concussive, yes?"

"Ours are, yes," Ranma answered, always happy to be complimented (even if he had to share the praise with Ryouga). "Some guys, like Herb and Saffron, can produce a lot of heat, too."

"As would be expected. They probably just localize the excited particles to a much smaller area… they confine the area of effect, so that the temperature increases dramatically. That, I have seen. Once. But not unaided…" After that, the Spanish man became quickly quiet, as if he had said too much.

"Maybe…" Ryouga mused.

Ranma interrupted, "So what's this technique you were going to show us?"

"Well, it isn't quite as impressive as yours, Saotome-san, or yours, Hibiki-san. But you may find it interesting." Nivelles reached down, and after a few seconds of searching, picked up a small rock. It was round, and about the size of the tip of one's finger. The blonde man held it up in his right hand, between his thumb and index finger.

His eyes widened for only a second, and he stared at the rock intently.

"There… Now. Watch!" And with that said, he released the rock and let his hand fall away and to the side. However, to the surprise of the two martial artists, the rock hovered in midair. Ranma was the first to react, as he tentatively reached out, and felt around in the air for wires or mirrors or any other sort of trick.

"He's… using his _ki_ to hold it in the air…?" Ryouga asked, wanting someone to confirm his theory. He had heard of such things, but not really believed them.

"Something like that," Alejandro said, and moved his eyes. The rock floated eerily to the right, and then back to the left, before falling down into the man's hand. He tossed it into the air, and Ranma caught it. The pigtailed martial artist stared at it intently, obviously trying to figure out the technique.

"If you want…" the blonde man continued, "You can learn to do that. And much, much, more. More than you ever imagined."

"Where? How?" Ranma and Ryouga asked, at the same time.

"Well, I didn't learn it in _El Unidad de Operaciones Especiales_, and I doubt it is something you'll ever find in a scroll, monastery or dojo. It is a science. A science called Psionics. Interested?"

Without hesitation, the two nodded eagerly.

"I thought so," Nivelles said with a broad smile. "In that case, come with me. There'll be paperwork to sign, the same stuff I went through a few years ago, but believe me: it is worth it."

"The aliens…" Ryouga spoke up, his voice laced with hatred. "You fight them, don't you?"

"Paperwork first, gentlemen." The older man turned, and started walking. "Then you get to hear the Truth."

Ranma hesitated, just a bit, and Ryouga passed him. The pigtailed boy frowned, but quickly caught up. He didn't really like the sound of 'paperwork' (living with Nabiki for two years would do that to you), but he did want to know the truth. And the thought of Ryouga getting special training and surpassing him again, like after he first learned the _shishi hokodan_… Ranma shuddered.

'Ah, the life of a martial artist,' he thought, and followed.

* * *

Nabiki Tendo inspected the sweater she had gotten. It felt strange, different from wool or cotton, and most unusual of all – it didn't have a tag at the back of the collar. It hadn't even had a price tag, which she found weird as well. It had been one of a few that a young woman, perhaps only a few years older than Nabiki herself, had been weaving by hand. Thankfully, the local woman was much more competent than Akane (or herself) and the result felt both warm and comfortable, if a tad loose. By the way she and Ribeiro had haggled, Nabiki got the impression that he had come here before to buy things, and so had others. 

The other Special Forces troopers, of course. That was Occam's Razor in action, but it didn't explain everything, like what a Brazilian man was doing in a secret Peruvian military unit. She didn't know even a little about South American politics, but she doubted that it was normal for SpecForces of one nation to have nationals from different countries. Then there was their treatment, and this little trip… it all seemed unusual, and to her, unusual equaled suspicious.

She had an unsettling feeling that they were being fattened before the slaughter.

Their host talked animatedly in some foreign language to another local villager, this time about the rug Kasumi wanted so much. Really, the oldest of the Tendo girls had gotten two things from the trip, instead of the one everyone else got. Their father had given in and gotten several ceramic cups for himself (when they were really for her). Nabiki preferred to be the one getting extra, (free!) things, but her mind was still too occupied to take full advantage.

Kasumi resumed looking between three different rugs that had been pulled out in front of her, and Ribeiro walked off to give her and the Tendo patriarch some room. Feeling a bit bold, Nabiki decided to try and milk him for more information. She folded up her new sweater, and walked over to his side, trying to appear casual. He looked down at her, hearing her approach. Nabiki almost stopped in her tracks, when she saw the look on his face.

Was that _amusement_?

It wasn't a reaction Nabiki usually engendered in people.

"Ribeiro-san…"

"Tendo-san?" he asked, obviously expecting some sort of inquiry.

"Not that I'm ungrateful for everything, but why are you doing this?" Nabiki asked, but kept her voice conspiratorially low. Akane was now with Kasumi and her father, and they were all waiting for the older girl to make her decision.

The Brazilian man looked at Nabiki with a strange expression, before growing a small smirk. "Because I was ordered to, of course."

That made sense, sort of.

"But why?" Nabiki wondered aloud. "Why? Why weren't we put in prison, or something? Why weren't we put under hot lights and interrogated? Why haven't you even asked us to keep quiet about what we saw… what we experienced?"

Riberio snorted, as if offended. "How crude do you think we are? Those sorts of tactics don't work. Well: not well _enough_, anyway."

"So, what? You're bribing us with a few trinkets, and a polite attitude?"

The man didn't answer that, preferring to silently watch the other Tendos.

"Or maybe…" Nabiki speculated. "You're just buying time for something. I don't suppose it was a coincidence that you didn't even try and persuade Ranma and Ryouga to come along?"

Riberio crossed his arms. His face never changed, but Nabiki could tell she had hit on something. His amusement was evaporating quickly. She could tell by the look in his eyes, which had suddenly taken on a dangerous edge. Despite his unassuming clothes, their host walked with a casual grace that bespoke a good deal of physical training. This wasn't some martial artist she was dealing with - it was a soldier. And beneath the polite and friendly exterior, Fukida Riberio was a very dangerous man.

"My associate wanted a few words with them. In private." She had expected him to try and backtrack, or make an attempt to blow off her theory. Instead, he answered in a way that seemed totally honest.

Nabiki started, and finally asked the burning question she wanted most for him to answer. "Who… who are you guys?"

Riberio set his jaw, but kept watching the others. "What you saw on that ship… I'm sorry you had to be exposed to that. But maybe some good can come of it."

What kind of answer was that?

But before Nabiki could try again, Kasumi waved him over, and he walked over to her.

"Damnit," Nabiki cursed. 'Why do I get the feeling we're being dealt out of the game? They're playing us for fools…'

* * *

"Retinal Scan complete. DNA records complete. Fingerprints on file. Voice imprints processed. Non-disclosure agreements… signed." Alejandro Nivelles checked to make sure the papers in question had been filled out correctly, before slipping them into a plain brown envelope. "You guys ready to take The Jump?" 

They were in one of the off-limits buildings, the one that had been marked 'Climatological Laboratory.' More than a few people worked there, but none seemed to be doing barometric research or rainfall studies. Though the sheer number of antennas and dishes on top of the building must have been doing something important… The three never ventured beyond the first floor, but the place was fairly busy, and three sealed-off rooms, with walls of thick glass, contained large computers or some other kind of machines.

Neither Ranma nor Ryouga were in any position to distinguish the two.

"The Jump?" Ranma asked. He fidgeted a bit with the laminated clip-on ID that had been attached to his shirt. It had his name in English, and a picture, along with some sort of bar code.

"Heh. That's just what we call the first time you go downstairs, where we keep all the really good stuff." Nivelles motioned for them to follow. "This way. We're headed for the warehouse."

This time it was Ryouga who asked, "The warehouse? Why?"

"You'll see." The older man's tone was much friendlier than either of the two martial artists expected. "You'll probably see most of this when you get to Japan, but things are a bit of a mess there right now. I can't say I envy you, going back."

"Why? Japan's a beautiful place…" Ranma felt some small nationalistic need to defend his homeland. Even though he didn't really have a lot to compare it to. Well, it was better than what he'd seen of China, at least.

"That's not quite what I meant, Saotome-san. You'll see for yourself soon enough."

They walked along the road to the warehouse (aka: the 'enclosed helicopter pad'). There was a large door, for trucks or the like, but they went in through a smaller personnel door on the left. Inside, a guard checked Nivelles' identification. Ranma and Ryouga heard the letters 'UID' but suspected it was some sort of slang. It certainly wasn't a word either had heard before. The inner doors were much thicker and heavier than they had expected, and they split down the middle, and retreated into the sides of the wall.

This took them into a hall, adjacent to the open area of the warehouse itself. They walked past windows, thick ones, which looked out into it. It looked empty, for the most part, with two parked trucks and four jeeps parked in little garages along the side or back. Two of the jeeps had some sort of weapon on them, like a machinegun. There also seemed to be weapons of some sort on the railing and catwalks along the inside of the area. Some crates and boxes were piled up here and there but they all looked the same.

The trio made their way out into the open area, but only for a few seconds, before they turned to what looked like a service elevator. Closer, now, the two younger men could see a faint outline against the ground, flanked by yellow lines of paint – the universal symbol for 'watch your footing here.' The lines went along in a big square in the middle of the warehouse.

"That's the main lift, for vehicles and cargo," Nivelles explained, noting their curiosity. Next to him, the service elevator arrived… from below. It was large enough for a dozen full-grown men to have plenty of room, and twelve feet high. Metal railing slid aside, and the three stepped in. Nivelles pressed a button (there was only one), and the elevator began to descend.

They passed through three floors of metal and concrete, before they saw open air. Before them, they saw the main lift shaft, supported by four large columns set into the sides of the wall. Looking up, they could see where the columns connected into the warehouse's floor, and below them, they could see the shaft stretch downward for more than a hundred feet. Much more.

"They were Sectoids."

Ranma and Ryouga looked at the blonde man curiously. The lost boy growled, catching the meaning immediately. He repeated the strange foreign word in a low tone. "Seccu-toydus…"

"Yes. They were the first aliens we encountered," Alejandro spoke as the elevator descended. "Now bear with me here, since some of this may even sound familiar. No doubt you've heard about Roswell and that whole business there half a century ago, maybe even stuff about Blue Book and Majestic 12. It's popular culture, now. Anyway, that was a medium scout… the Americans didn't shoot it down, though. There were human remains in it, two sets of bones, so it is likely that one or both of the victims gained consciousness and started a struggle onboard. One of them probably hid behind the ship's Elerium Reactor, then one of the aliens chanced a shot, and the whole thing was blown to Hell."

"When I saw you, Saotome-san, alive in the ship… and when I heard your story, I immediately thought about Roswell. That was a fluke, and so was what you two managed to pull off. Sectoids always did underestimate people…" Nivelles smirked. "Anyway. That was fifty years ago. For a while, the aliens came and went as they pleased, and did whatever they liked. No human aircraft could catch them, and no military force could engage them. Do you remember the _Kiryu Kai_, back in '98?"

Ranma shook his head, and Ryouga followed a second later.

"Well," Alejandro explained. "The _Kiryu Kai_ was an attempt by the JSDAF to intercept a UFO. While it was not well covered by the media, there had been a troubling spike in alien activity across the globe between the eighties and nineties. Flybys and the like became less common, while abductions and cattle mutilations became increasingly commonplace. The Americans had tried to open communication with the 'visitors' for years, under Project _Blue Skies_, and the USSR tried to intercept a UFO at least twelve times. Japan thought it could do better…"

Nivelles frowned. "Between August in '98, and January of '99, they came close, twice. Much closer than the Americans or Russians. They called the Project a failure, not because they couldn't identify or approach their target, but because the aliens shot them down. Six aircraft were lost. None of the pilots even had a chance to eject. No less than a week after the first plane was lost; an elite Special Forces unit was wiped out to a man in Russia, investigating a landing."

The Captain paused, a moment of silence for those he considered the first official casualties in the ongoing Secret War. He also took the opportunity to observe the reactions of his two guests. Ranma looked angry, but Ryouga's expression was the same as before: a cold fury. But the so-called 'lost boy' already seemed to hate the aliens with a passion. Nivelles couldn't blame him.

"Starting on December 11, 1998, a secret meeting was held in Geneva to discuss a response to the Earth's increasingly hostile and belligerent visitors. After two weeks of debate, the decision was made to organize a covert, international military response to the acts of alien aggression. Funded by a governing council of the world's most economically powerful countries, this organization would be equipped with the world's finest pilots, soldiers, scientists and engineers, working together for a common goal: to preserve human life and dignity on Earth. The formal name given to this force was UNETCO – the United Nations Extra Terrestrial Combat Organization. Though we're not actually a part of the UN, it's just a politically appealing moniker. Most of us just call it XCOM."

The elevator finally stopped, and the metal railing retracted. Before the two martial artists stretched a manmade cavern, obviously designed for storage and the like. More cargo containers and boxes piled up along the sides. In front of them, however, loomed the gaping maw of an entranceway, a massive single blast door hinged off to the side. It looked like the door to a bank vault, times five.

They followed Nivelles closely, as he crossed through the open entryway, and into a large, long hall. It was open, and three stories high. People in white coats moved around, along with some in green and brown fatigues and black uniforms. Set into the floor was a round emblem of an eagle, facing the right, with wings outstretched. It had a plain white shield in its right talons, a clutch of golden arrows in the other. Laurels and an olive branch crowned the eagle, from the top of the seal to the tips of its wings, while a geographic satellite picture of the Earth was set across its chest. On an encircling band, the English words: United Nations Extra Terrestrial Combat Organization were in white, on a black background.

"This is B4. The fourth base built by XCOM. Codename: _El Dorado_. You've signed the Silence Papers, but we can't force you to join. You're still civilians. By the end of the day, though, we'll need an answer, one only you can give."

"I… don't know about this…" Ranma said, quietly. He wasn't overawed easily, and he didn't much like it either. Ryouga was a different case altogether.

"I'm in," the lost boy said, quickly, sharply. "If it means killing these creatures, I don't care what I have to do! Count me in!"

Ranma looked at his sometime-friend with concern and frustration.

"I thought you'd feel that way," Nivelles replied, still with a smile. "This way, if you will. You two haven't seen anything yet…"

And he led the two deeper into the base.


	10. Strength in Numbers I

The year is 2005. For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. Ranma and Ryouga are initiated into the secrets of UNETCO, but the fate of the Tendo family has not yet been decided. Their fates, and those of martial artists across Japan and China, now hang in the balance.

* * *

**The Road To Cydonia**

_**Chapter IV**_

_Strength in Numbers_

* * *

The flight back to Japan seemed to take forever. Ranma wasn't a patient person to begin with, and being confined to a plane, even under the best conditions, he quickly found himself longing for some greater variety in surroundings. In another way, he felt a little bad about that – after all, how many people ever got to fly in a private jet like this? It was infinitely preferable to having to fly coach, packed in like sardines with screaming children wailing every couple minutes. 

On his way back to the front half of the plane from the bathroom, he passed two of the three Tendo girls. Akane was blissfully asleep, and Kasumi had her nose in a book, reading by a soft light just over her head and behind her shoulder. The oldest sister wasn't a problem, and probably never would be, but Akane… it really had been best to wait for her to doze off before they got to business.

Back in the front compartment of the private jet, the mood was more somber. Nabiki, unlike her sisters, couldn't be so easily worked around. She was naturally more than a little nosy about the politics they're ended up involved in, and she didn't like being kept in the dark. He supposed he couldn't blame her. So rather than even try, they had decided to let her in on their little strategy session, and she'd been content to just listen for most of it.

Mr. Tendo had a pencil and a pad of paper, since he'd volunteered to keep notes of their ideas. It was almost strange seeing him in anything but his normal brown clothes, but with those back in Nerima, he'd appropriated a respectable white business shirt and black pants. Ryouga sat in the seat directly in front of Soun, swiveled slightly so his back wasn't to the others, wearing almost the same ensemble. Of the three men, only Ranma had opted to wear a more casual button-less t-shirt.

He sat down opposite Ryouga, and leaned back in the business chair.

"What were we up to again?" he asked, getting comfortable. "Ucchan, right?"

Ryouga nodded.

"Yes," Soun added.

Ranma crossed his arms, and the small group was silent again. They were making a list, checking it twice, even. Ryouga had jumped right into joining XCOM with typical thoughtless bloody-mindedness, and after that, Ranma had felt compelled to also step up to the plate, if more reluctantly. They'd had a quick talk with the base commander back in Peru, and he'd told them that they'd be sent back to the Japan Branch of UNETCO, and that by the time they got there, they should be ready to give a report.

The commander there wanted a list of all the martial artists and "exceptional individuals" they knew, along with their locations and their abilities. Said commander also wanted a much shorter list of local martial artists to form two experimental squads for field duty. Ryouga had no problem with the idea, but Ranma wasn't quite so eager to send friends and acquaintances into such a dangerous situation. Wasn't it bad enough that they were targets for these aliens, now? XCOM had promised to keep as many of them safe as they could, but from what he'd heard, the East Asian alien problem was getting worse and worse, and he had some doubts as to the effectiveness of the supposed 'protection program.'

They'd covered pretty much all of the minor martial artists already, along with general information about the china gangs. Most of the latter were too specialized and obscure in their applications of the Art to be truly useful. A perfect example of that problem was Mikado Sanzenin, who (if he was even still alive) was a fairly impressive opponent on the ice with his Martial Arts Skating, but otherwise rather useless. Like Ryouga and Mr. Tendo, Ranma had agreed that only the strongest martial artists should be recommended to actually fight.

Which, of course, also ruled out Akane, but they left that unsaid for now.

"Ukyou…" Ryouga spoke up, finally. "No. She's too weak."

"Too weak?" Ranma snapped back, if only to defend his old friend. "She's one of the strongest people I know! How can you give Kuno a passing mark, and count out Ucchan?"

Ryouga huffed. "I wouldn't be surprised if I know her fighting style better than you do, Ranma. I don't think she's ready for something like this. Besides, she has the same baggage Shampoo does. She'll want to work with you, and it will lead to the same mess as before. Plus, she lacks the same willpower Kuno has, I think."

"You and her have worked pretty well together before," Ranma countered. "While I've never seen you do anything but fight with Kuno."

"Ukyou and I only worked together to try and break up you and Akane. When I told her I wasn't going to do that anymore… " Ryouga looked down at his hands. "I can't say I want her watching my back, Ranma. And she won't want to be with me when she could be with you."

"Are you sayin' you two had a fight?" Ranma asked, and he shook his head a little. "Geez, man. I thought you two were friends or something."

"I thought so, too, for a little while," Ryouga said the last two words softly, but quickly snapped back to the real topic: who was strong, and who he could take with him on his crusade of revenge. Ranma could almost see when the anger in his eyes replaced the sadness and disappointment, smothering it ruthlessly.

"Ucchan can get better. She just hasn't had any reason to train in a while. It doesn't help that Konatsu is around to help her, now."

"Fine, if you want to stick your neck out for her, go ahead!" Ryouga grimaced after saying it, obviously remembering some sort of bad blood that had passed between him and the okonomiyaki chef. Ranma frowned at that. Why couldn't his friends just get along, for once?

"Speaking of Konatsu," the lost boy continued, changing the topic somewhat. "I've heard he's good, but I never got the chance to fight him."

Ranma let the matter with Ukyou drop, and moved on. "Konatsu. He's quick and has a heavy reliance on weapons. Sorta like Mousse, but his reach ain't so great. When he ate that battle medicine, he put out a real good aura, but didn't know how ta use it. A lot'a his techniques aren't very useful, but he's got some body replication and body replacement and those other high-end _ninjutsu_ down. He's pretty stealthy, too, but his danger sense ain't so great."

Ryouga and Soun made similar 'hmm's as they took in that information.

"What do you think, Tendo-san?" the lost boy asked, after a few seconds.

Soun answered seriously, "Genma would know more, but from what little I've seen of him, he has good balance, and understanding of advanced techniques. One of his problems seems to be a lack of experience with stronger martial artists like yourselves. I've never detected any strong _ki_ from him, though."

"Should we try and pick him up, then?" Ryouga asked. "He may or may not already be a target. It could be we're only putting him in danger."

"He'll also want to go where Ukyou goes," Ranma pointed out, and the three lapsed into silence again.

"Perhaps we should focus first on a more obvious candidate," Soun suggested.

"Mousse," Ranma said, and Ryouga nodded.

"If he's still with us, then he and Shampoo are definitely targets," Ranma continued. "Cologne, too."

"According to the information we were given," Soun replied, looking from one of the boys to the other. "The _Nekohanten_ burned down the night of the attack."

"I'm sure Cologne was fighting," Ryouga interjected. "I had an easier time getting to the ship by the dojo because several of the aliens ran towards the Cat Café. I could feel her energy, too. Whatever she faced off against must've been…"

He closed his eyes, and remembered that horrible face, those empty sockets where eyes should have been, that terrible and irresistible power. If those aliens had been the ones assigned to abduct the Tendos, he doubted he'd have been able to save them. They'd have ended up like Akari, or worse. He clenched his fists tightly at his own weakness, his helplessness, in the face of such a demonic opponent.

"Let's assume they're all alive and hiding out," Ranma said, sensing his tension in among them. "Ok? Cologne we can work with, but what about Mousse and Shampoo?"

"You do realize you'll have to break them up," Nabiki interrupted them, and the three men turned to give her their attention. She was here mostly as a guest, since her knowledge of martial arts was minimal.

"Good luck with that," Ryouga said with a dismissive snort.

Nabiki continued, ignoring his tone. "I can't speak for their skills like you guys can, but they're transparent enough in their intentions. You think Ukyou is bad? Shampoo will demand to go with Ranma, and I doubt anything will stop her. And she'll bring Mousse along with her, because he still won't trust her around you, Ranma."

"You mean he won't trust me around her?" Ranma asked, giving Nabiki a questioning look.

"I meant exactly what I said," Nabiki replied. "I'm sure Mousse knows by now you're not interested in Shampoo, and I think he probably trusts you more than her at this point."

"I think so too." Ryouga piped up, but didn't elaborate.

"Alright." Ranma shrugged. "Whatever. So what do we do?"

"You…" Nabiki pointed at the pigtailed boy. "Have to be firm with Shampoo, and get her to back down a little. And you." Here, the directed her attention to the lost boy. "Will have to keep Mousse in line."

The two martial artists seemed to think it over for a few seconds, before coming to an agreement. Soun took note of it, and quickly got to writing something down on the pad of paper he held propped up to his right knee. Nabiki went back to listening, while the males in the group hammered out who else they would try and recruit, and who they would recommend for the 'protection program.'

It had taken longer than she had thought, at one point pulling Ranma and Ryouga into another particularly heated argument about sealed and forbidden techniques. Still, she waited patiently and let them sort things out. Only once they were done, did she tell them what they would do with her, Akane, and Kasumi. To their credit, they didn't even try and argue with her. She smiled at that.

They were learning.

* * *

Genma didn't feel entirely comfortable around Shampoo. 

He never had, even after she had stopped trying to dismember him. It wasn't just the memory of her chasing him and Ranma around China, sword (or other weapon) in hand. He was rather used to people chasing after him in a rage, and he didn't hold it against anyone. It was so much easier to forget a grudge than to dwell on it.

No: it was that intense look the girl sometimes had, like a cat staring at a mouse from behind a cage. He could almost feel her warrior intention, and it was to strike him down, if only he wasn't Ranma's father. So she held back and mostly ignored him. This arrangement had made the last few days rather uncomfortable, to say the least.

He hadn't forgotten that whole turning him into a slave, Mistress Shampoo stuff either, back at Jusendo. A sound at the window got his attention, and he saw white wings, and a cursed body. Genma quickly reached over, unlocked the window, and let Mousse in. There was already a glass of hot water ready, and he upended it over the duck without ceremony.

Mousse rose, shrugging on his clothes, and then sat cross-legged without a word.

"Well?" Genma prompted. "Did you get it?"

Mousse reached into his right sleeve, and pulled out two plastic bags. Putting one down, he handed the other to the elder Saotome. The second he put between himself and Shampoo. The Styrofoam packaging held a variety of yakitori, still hot and fresh. Mousse seemed to wait for thanks, but both Genma and Shampoo went straight for the food. If he was perturbed by it, he didn't show it in his features, and all three ate in relative silence.

There was nothing exceptional about the food, or the accommodations. With the _Nekohanten_ burned down, Mousse and Shampoo had emerged from the rubble in their cursed forms. Cologne was nowhere to be found, and she hadn't come for them. To their surprise, a peculiar panda had been the only familiar face among police officers and firemen.

Cologne had left plans in case of emergency, and one of them was a tiny makeshift loft, nothing more than a single living area and a bathroom. They were about two miles from Nerima, a little closer to Tokyo proper. Genma later explained that he had gone to see Dr. Tofu, but that the other man was missing. After confirming that _Ucchans_ was no better off than the _Nekohanten_, they had unenthusiastically agreed to stick together.

That had been little under a week ago.

Mousse chewed on the yakitori, and massaged a piece of chicken out from between his teeth with his tongue. It wasn't bad, really, even he was rather sick of going out under cover of his curse and misusing his hidden weapons skills. Yesterday, it had been KFC, and the day before that he had been sent to get American style pizza, in addition to his other work. Still, the food was nothing to complain about, and even the Spartan apartment was quite livable, if very crowded between the three of them.

What Mousse didn't enjoy was how they seemed to sit in silence for such long tracks of time, and how they couldn't figure out what to do next. It was true he didn't know Genma at all, and had never really given him a second thought, but he had expected it to be easier for him and Shampoo to iron something out. Apparently not, he inwardly remarked with a cringe.

Mousse wasn't normally someone who was needy when it came to friends or attention, but he found himself wishing he'd ended up with some actual peers. If Ranma and Ryouga or even Kuno had been around, they'd all have come up with some (probably hair brained and shortsighted) plan, but at least they'd have been together. Fighting and bickering, of course, but still together. Those bozos were probably the best friends he had right now, wherever the hell they were.

To no one's surprise, Genma finished eating first. Both Chinese Amazons inched away, shielding their food with their bodies. The gesture never seemed to insult Genma, and if anything he looked smug about being a notorious food thief. He certainly hadn't hesitated to take more than his fair share of KFC the other day, and as for the pizza… well. The fight over the last slice had been almost a welcome break in the tension.

"I assume you used cash," Genma asked, once Mousse and Shampoo finished at around the same time.

"We're almost all out after this," the longhaired boy replied despondently. "We'll have to risk using an ATM or a credit card, unless you've stashed away some pachinko chips or something somewhere."

"Is that safe to do yet?" Shampoo asked, and Mousse shook his head.

"I flew over Nerima before I got the food, and there are still suspicious guys hanging around; a van near the _Nekohanten_ and a sport utility vehicle down the block from _Ucchans_. Didn't look like normal Immigration Bureau types, but at least most of them were Japanese."

"You mean at least they look Japanese!" Shampoo said, but kept her voice low. "You no can say for sure. They looking for us, waiting for us!"

"I went by the dojo, too. It's still mostly intact, and there wasn't anything aside from the police tape. Looks like they closed Furinkan, too, but the Kuno place seems to be untouched, so I doubt the Principal is anything other than spooked. Not that I know if he's there or not, anyway." Mousse lifted his thick coke-bottle glassed up to rest on the top of his head and give his face breathing space.

Genma nodded at that, but asked about something else that had been mentioned. "You said most of them were Japanese? Not all?"

"There was an American, too. I think. He spoke English, drove from _Ucchans_ to the _Nekohanten_, and then to the Tendo Dojo. From the way he walked when he stepped out of the car, I think he's ex-military," Mousse observed, and then amended himself, "Or maybe still military. Who knows?"

"You should have jump him. Make him talk!" Shampoo grumbled. "Now he gone and we back where we started."

"I thought we were trying to keep a low profile and not attract attention?" Mousse replied, but tried not to sound too critical of her plan, even if did think it short sighted and impulsive (and wasn't that ironic, coming from him). A lot of their important personal property and documentation had been lost with the _Nekohanten_, including their landing permission papers.

"What about Nodoka?" Genma then asked, with a little urgency to his voice. "Is she still…?"

"She's still there, yes," Mousse confirmed that one positive fact. "I saw her myself. WITH my glasses on."

"Good." Genma coughed, and corrected himself quickly. "Not that I'm worried about her, but it wouldn't do for the house to be destroyed. Again."

Shampoo at least had the decency at that to look somewhat ashamed.

"Look," Mousse spoke up, a little louder than before. "I don't think we can stay here much longer like this. Either we withdraw money, risk someone tracing the card, and go back to hiding somewhere, or we take action."

"What kind of action we possibly take, stupid Mousse?" Shampoo replied, her tone icy. "You think we can rescue _airen_ or even others from alien monsters? Maybe you have plan how to go to space? You think you can beat creatures what kill great grandmother!"

Mousse instinctively shirked away from her, at first not even risking a reply.

"No," he replied, in a quiet voice after a few seconds. Shampoo was still simmering with pent up anger and fear, but she deflated a little and looked away to an empty wall.

"No. This isn't like with Herb or Saffron or any of those other times," he admitted. "This is out of our league and I know it. I think at this point, we have to choose. Either we can keep hiding, maybe even try and get back to China and give up here… or we can see what those black suits want. Maybe they can even help."

"Or maybe they're the ones behind all this. Maybe they're the ones who arranged for all this to happen," Genma spoke up, when Shampoo didn't. "What I saw… it wasn't human."

"Maybe was trick? Martial arts illusion?" Shampoo spoke with a hint of hope, now. An alien from space was out of her reach, but a human being using martial arts, or even magic and trickery, was a foe she could face, even if it had somehow bested her powerful great grandmother Cologne.

Genma just shook his head. "No. The only thing I've ever seen that was close to this… was back when I was training Ranma, about six years ago. We stopped by this shrine in a town to the north. It was winter, and we were looking for some free shelter. The shrine was to a _kappa_, a water imp, but this wasn't like the pictures of them you see now. The eyes were wide and round and it had no hair or shell. The statue had this mouth full of little teeth, and webbed hands, and it sent a chill down my spine. Even after seeing real demons, facing real monsters, that statue still made my skin crawl."

"The villagers said that they sometimes found their livestock, especially pigs, drowned in the river or lake nearby, and that they were always missing their entrails. They blamed the _kappa_, and said that sometimes children disappeared too, and that the _kappa_ were even known to assault women. I'd dismissed it at the time, since I know what can happen to a body if it's been in the water for a few days. But now, I've seen the models for those… things. They're real. They're real."

Mousse couldn't see, but he could feel a chill run down his spine as well. He looked in Shampoo's direction, and could feel the vague fluctuation in her _ki_ somewhere amid the blur of his terrible vision. They hadn't seen anything like Genma had, not first hand, but they had felt it. The simple presence of whatever had battled Cologne had been like cold hands around his neck.

"Shampoo think… we should go home," the Amazon girl finally said. "We have to tell tribe about what happen. Have to make sure it not happen there!"

Mousse had to agree, even if he didn't exactly love the place of his birth. "So that's it, then?"

Genma was silent, and the trio were hard pressed to continue on that train of thought. Mousse actually felt sort of bad about it, in fact, he felt downright rotten. Ranma wouldn't have run if Mousse and Shampoo had been taken, not even by an enemy like this. Thinking it over, he was certain that the pig-tailed boy would have seized even the smallest, most remote chance, if it meant helping out his friends.

He'd have gone to the authorities, not ran away.

"I…" Mousse started to say, but wasn't sure how, or even if he really meant to follow through with what he was thinking. Why should he stick his neck out for Ranma, or even for the Tendos? The smart thing to do would have been to go back to China with Shampoo, support her through the tough times ahead, and hope for her to fall even a little bit as in love with him as he was with her. Who cared about Ranma?

After all, Mousse had tried for so long to get rid of him, and now he was gone. Forever. As good as dead. He didn't know Akane or Nabiki or Kasumi or any of them very well, and it wasn't like he was inclined to defend every hard case he came across, like a certain lost boy. Screw 'em, right? Ranma – good riddance! Right?

A year ago, he'd have probably shed tears of joy.

Why did that make him feel so bad, now, just thinking about it? Sure Ranma had helped him a few times, worked with him a few times, and after the big fight at _Jusendo_ they'd come to a sort of understanding. Ranma was also the biggest obstacle between him and Shampoo. Ranma was also an arrogant jerk who got in the way as much as he helped, and caused trouble for everyone around him.

"Damnit," Mousse cursed, but at a whisper's volume.

"You can both go," Genma said, breaking his silent spell. "I'm going to do what little I can to find my boy…. Nodoka would kill me if I didn't."

"You is stupid if you think…"

"Yeah." Mousse let out a long sigh, and slapped his thigh. "Yeah. I'm going to stay, too."

Shampoo looked at his with disbelieving eyes. It was a pity he couldn't see them clearly, or the expression on her face. What he did see was the blurry figure that was Genma, giving him a grateful nod of approval.

"Mousse..." Shampoo said, softly. "You… you such stupid male…"

"Don't either of you think I'm doing this for Ranma. As a man, I just can't let this sort of thing go unpunished!" Mousse smirked, and ducked his hands into his sleeves. "That's all it is."

"Shampoo no can back down when both too-cowardly male and weak Amazon male go try risk their lives to fight monster." She remarked, trying to sound serious and solemn. "One maybe, but not when both go. Must go also for Amazon Pride."

"And the Tribe?" Mousse asked. He wasn't really sure he wanted Shampoo to risk her life on such short odds of success.

"Shampoo write them letter explaining everything; hope they no think it joke."

"Then it's settled." Genma faced the two Chinese amazons directly, and bowed his head low. He didn't outright speak his thanks, but the gesture was honest, for once, and they recognized that fact. Oddly, the more Mousse thought about what he was doing, the more he became resigned to it. Even if they did get Ranma back, it wouldn't change the fact that the pigtailed martial artist preferred even Ukyou to Shampoo. Yes, he would bide his time, and eventually, Shampoo would be his.

Besides, it would be nice to have Ranma owe him one for a change.


	11. Strength in Numbers II

Ukyou didn't like being away from her _yatai_, but she wasn't about to raise a big stink about it. She'd left the vending cart in Osaka with her father, so she knew it was in good hands. Outside the scenery passed by at high speed below her, illuminated only by night-lights from houses and flanking the highway. It was different from flying in a plane, and she felt another little rush of excitement.

Sitting next to her in the helicopter, Konatsu fidgeted with his kimono, a sure sign he was anxious. She gave him a confident smile, and he brightened up instantly, though his nervous hands still wound into the fabric of his obi. She understood why he was like this, from what he had told her about the latest chaos in Nerima, but Ukyou was pretty sure he was exaggerating.

It was only natural, since Konatsu had never been around for the truly crazy adventures. He had arrived late on the scene, and so he'd missed a lot of the action. According to the poor cross-dressing boy, real honest-to-god monsters had attacked the town. Following his ninja training, he'd gone into hiding outside the restaurant, and not a moment too soon. According to him, the whole building had gone up in a tremendous explosion, spontaneously combusting from out of nowhere, no more than a few seconds since he'd left it.

Ukyou had been furious at that, even before he had told her that the _Nekohanten _had also been destroyed, and that the Tendo Dojo was empty. She was sure that Ranma and the others had escaped somewhere, but her store… she was only leasing it, and while her insurance covered a wide range of damages, she doubted they'd like to hear that it had 'spontaneously combusted.' Hopefully she could get away with claiming it was a gas leak, or an electrical fire, or something that didn't sound too fraudulent.

Regardless, she had been getting ready to head back to Nerima to find Ranma, and offer her help beating down whatever Chinese Prince or other lunatic was responsible, when a man from the Ministry of Justice had contacted her. Again, that wasn't too unusual, though the authorities normally didn't get involved in martial arts skirmishes to her knowledge. She'd talked to them before, so she hadn't been about to snub them now.

Konatsu had been more leery of the authorities, but she had forced him to give a statement as well. They'd need it for the insurance company anyway, but Konatsu had to have even the simplest business sense ironed into his thick skull, so she forgave his naiveté. Far worse than the Ministry suit they'd sent over had been her father, when he'd realized Konatsu was a cross dresser, and staying with his daughter no less. She'd never bothered to tell her old man about Ranma's curse, and that whole mess had served to remind her why she'd held her tongue.

She'd still planned to take the train back to Tokyo when she'd gotten another call, this time from an official at the National Police Agency, telling her to stay put. Apparently, they'd designated Nerima the "latest victim of endemic terrorist activity" and that, because of the ongoing investigation, they wanted her to come to a "secure facility." Martial artists had been attacked specifically, they'd said, and almost as an afterthought added that leaving Osaka would "constitute noncompliant action resulting in criminal prosecution."

That had been a little sobering, so she'd stayed at home between her father and Konatsu (who had swung from nervous fear to fits of jubilee over having a 'daddy' again). At least she'd still been able to do business for a while, before some men in a sedan had picked up her and Konatsu. Then, to her surprise and excitement, they'd been transferred to a black helicopter, and it was a real beauty of a machine, too.

Going to an all-boys school, she'd been deluged by images and information about the toys and machines that gender tended to like. All that had included indoctrination into the faith of military machinery and vehicles in general. Later, after getting her license, she'd had fun driving different vehicles (though never buying one). It was too bad none of her Nerima friends seemed interested in cars or bikes, but she'd surprised her elementary school friends by not 'binding up' at the last reunion, and they'd been more than happy to indulge her.

Helicopters, like jets and missiles, were almost universally cool, and over the years she'd picked up bits of info about the usual commercial ones in use, along with a lot of the military machines used by the JSDF. Seeing this one, and actually riding in it, had topped out that time she'd touched a Type-90 tank (the world's most expensive!). It was ultra silent running, with sleek lines and a profile that would wet the pants of a conspiracy theorist. She almost giggled at the thought, and that was something Ukyou Kounji rarely did. Chuckle, maybe, but giggle, not likely.

"I think we're landing," Konatsu interrupted her thoughts. He was looking out the window on the other side of the passenger compartment.

"We've only been flying for a little while," Ukyou replied, also looking out the window. "I think we passed by Akutagawa, and look at all those lights. Kyoto, I'd bet."

"I'm still a little worried about all this, Ukyou-sama…"

"Don't worry sugar," she reassured him, but she knew he wouldn't be back to his normal self until things were back to what passed for normal. "If we were really in any danger from these guys, do you think running would help? Let's just ride this out and see where it takes us, ok?"

Konatsu nodded, mollified for the time being.

The helicopter descended swiftly, but with very little turbulence, in the middle of a field. From her window, Ukyou could see a parked car, black in color. It wasn't like she wasn't a little nervous, too, about all the spy-type stuff; it was just that she found it really interesting, too. A few shapes emerged from the parked vehicle, and made their way towards the helicopter, but they were difficult to make out in the darkness.

The government man sitting across from them stood, and opened the door. A gust of air made Ukyou turn her head and cover her face, and she wondered who they were meeting with. She considered this a pretty formal occasion, so while Konatsu had worn a kimono, she'd put on a light blue shirt, black pants and navy blue blazer. She'd also brought a tie the same color as the clip in her hair (just in case), but for now kept her collar unbuttoned and open. She prided herself on being a businesswoman under these circumstances, as well as a martial artist, and she was more comfortable wearing boy's clothes when meeting with other important people, like at the bank or the police.

When she caught the first clear glimpse of who two of the men were helping up and into the helicopter, she gasped.

"You!" she cried, and pointed. "What are you doing here?"

Tatewaki Kuno, age 19, struggling freshman and rising star of the University of Kyoto Kendo Team, looked up at her and snapped his fingers in recognition. Ukyou waited for him, but he plainly couldn't remember where he had seen her, and after a few seconds of thought, he settled for:

"Do we know each other?"

The other man in the passenger compartment helped Kuno up, and closed the door behind him. The college freshman took a seat opposite Konatsu, who waved at him shyly. Watching with more than a little disgust, Ukyou wondered if Kuno knew the gender of the 'cute girl' in the kimono. The former Furinkan student was, like Ukyou herself, dressed in formal business clothes, except his jacket wasn't a blazer, and it was a darker shade of blue like his tie.

Of course, he wore a bokken strapped to his silver-buckled belt.

"I suppose I shouldn't be surprised you don't remember." Ukyou refrained from calling him an idiot, only because he had never interacted with her very often. They'd talked briefly at the last Christmas party Kasumi had held, and he'd been in the background for some events (like the wedding melee a couple months ago), but even back in Furinkan they'd never interacted really.

"Ukyou Kuonji," she introduced herself, and bowed her head politely. Since she'd brought them for this occasion, she decided to part with one of her business cards, reaching into one of her blazer's pockets and handing the small piece of paper to the kendoist. He took it and she gestured to the giant spatula on the floor near Konatsu. It had been too big to fit behind her, or anywhere else really. "Ring a bell?"

"Ah, yes. I remember now! Tatewaki Kuno, age 19." Kuno inclined his head after pocketing the business card. He then assumed a leisurely posture, with his legs planted firmly on the floor. A second later the helicopter started to rise. "You went to Furinkan, am I right? I've seen you in the company of Akane Tendo and the pig tailed girl."

Ukyou was sorely tempted to say, "You mean Akane and Ranma?" but instead just nodded.

"I have not been able to see my true loves in some time," Kuno continued to say, tangling his fingers into his unruly bangs. "Tell me, are they well? Do they know the former Blue Thunder of Furinkan High has them in his heart, always? That he keeps their images safe from the capricious vandalism of drunken louts and roommates?"

Ukyou looked away and rolled her eyes. "Last I saw, they were both fine."

"And who is this fair maiden?" Kuno asked, obviously meaning Konatsu.

"Go ahead," Ukyou prompted, sounding bored.

"My name is Konatsu," the boy said, sounding more like a woman than he had a right to. He bowed his head demurely, to Kuno's obvious delight. "I am honored to meet you, Kuno-san."

He reached out and took Konatsu's hands in his own.

"Truly it is!" Tatewaki preened happily. "Such a light as you will make this long flight seem as fleeting as the deadline for a midterm paper!"

"Which reminds me," Ukyou interrupted, propping her cheek against her hand and her elbow on the armrest. "What brings you out here, anyway? Do you know where we're headed?"

Kuno deflated a little, and he returned to his seat. "No. I do not. However, it was made clear to me that I was to meet some important people, and take a break from my important studies. I believe there had been some trouble back home."

"I suppose we'll find out when we get… whatever," Ukyou replied, making the decision not to tell Kuno the stuff Konatsu had told her. The last thing she needed was him getting hysterical about his two loves safety in a helicopter a couple hundred feet in the air. That they had also gone to the trouble of picking up Kuno, however, made the gears in her head spin.

How serious was this new crisis, anyway?

The black helicopter swooped silently across the sleeping countryside.

* * *

West-Central Honshu

Toyama was not a small city, and it lit up the horizon as a black helicopter landed on a small landing pad flanked by warehouses. It attracted no attention, and went unseen and unreported by officials at the major commercial airport, just a few miles away. It was late, so late that public transportation wasn't available, leaving most of those still awake to work or party solely by foot. Even then, the airport conducted business, and a large airliner took to the air with a distant roar.

The area around the landed helicopter belonged to a privately owned shipping concern, one of the many publicly visible faces of UNETCO. It did the normal amount of legitimate and wholly uninteresting shipping, and a discrete amount of business that was a little more unusual. Amid the boxes and crates, there were those containing frozen alien corpses, military grade weapons and explosives, and some items of a fantastic nature that crossed the line into science fiction.

However, even if one became curious enough to risk a personal investigation, against the advice of local and federal law enforcement and customs officials, the site was still well patrolled by officers from a very private and exclusive security firm. This, too, was a branch of UNETCO, as even mundane facilities could be discovered, and attacked by the Enemy. This facility was considered both secure and perfectly located for its purpose.

This was the main transit point for supplies headed to and from the Japan Branch of XCOM. Nestled amid Hide Mountains to the east, bordering between the Nagano, Toyama and Gifu Prefectures, in a warren of structures termed Seiran Mountain, that elite organization saw to the defense of the Japanese home islands, much of the Pacific, Oceana, both Koreas, and parts of China and Russia. For several years, it had been more than sufficient, and even seen as an easy assignment.

Not anymore.

While sophisticated electronic surveillance watched the warehouses and the property perimeter, far more advanced equipment many miles away watched the skies. The information made available to XCOM included that gathered from radar dishes across Japan, including the instruments at Toyama Airport. The star strewn skies were clear and seemingly benign this night, but for those who knew, they were fickle and could bring danger at any moment. The last few months, things had escalated dramatically, and the night skies had grown increasingly threatening.

Mousse adjusted his glasses, and took in his new surroundings. He was familiar with warehouse districts, but there was an ordered and stark precision to this place. He was instantly struck by the hunch that it was a military facility - as if the fact that he'd come here in a black stealth helicopter hadn't already given him that impression. The area around the landing pad was not bathed in light like one would expect, even though there seemed to be lights.

"Probably ultraviolet," he mused to himself, but didn't bother Genma or Shampoo with the educated guess. Mousse wasn't an idiot when it came to hardware. Not only did he have to know, at least generally, about the dangers of flying in an urban area, he was a Hidden Weapons master. He knew his grades of steels and the weapons of others, just like he knew how to maintain his own vast arsenal.

He'd been forced to explore and learn, first hand, about the world outside the Amazon village. It was the only way he could get strong; much less get a proper education. He was a man with something to prove, to Shampoo, and to the village as a whole. He was a male, but he was determined to make something of himself - make a name for himself! One day, he swore, he would make the village elders acknowledge him and show him respect.

He'd live long enough to be an old prune like Happosai, if it took that.

The man they had ridden in the helicopter with also disembarked behind them. He wore a black suit and tie, but his two friends walking up to the martial arts trio didn't bother with the pretense. Both wore white and gray urban fatigues; Mousse effortlessly discerned all the weapons they carried, including the knife one had tucked into his right boot, and the small pistol the other thought he was so clever hiding below his left armpit. Hidden weapons he had no problem with, faces and normal silhouettes, on the other hand…

The one thing he couldn't find were their flags or their rank insignia.

"This way, please," the short man in the black suit ushered them forward, and towards one of the warehouses. Halfway there, Mousse was struck with a familiar feeling, and from Shampoo and Genma's posture, he knew they sensed it as well. Still, none of them were sure whether that was an entirely good or bad thing. If Ranma was here, and alive, it didn't necessarily mean he was present of his own volition.

They entered through one of the small personnel doors. Unlike the dark exterior, the inside of the warehouse was bathed in warm and welcoming light. It was entirely open, with a ceiling that towered far over their heads, and it was large enough to easily conceal two or even three large fighter craft. The two guards hadn't entered, but the black suit had, and he stepped aside to let them take in those already present.

There had to be about a dozen people, including three he didn't recognize. With his glasses on, he saw the faces of those he'd assumed missing at best, dead at worst. Ranma was there, along with the Tendo clan, and so were Ukyou, her waiter friend, and even Kuno (who had, of course, taken up the occasion to annoy his 'beloved Akane'). Shampoo and Genma ran forward to meet up with the group, but Mousse hung back and looked around.

There was a reinforced catwalk around the inside of the warehouse; going along the sides and at two points crossing over the center. He also noted that the exits were closed, but seemed unguarded – at least from the inside. There were cameras in several areas; watching and recording what went on below, but no easily identified ventilation to take possible advantage of. Sighing, Mousse walked over to where Ryouga stood by himself, near a small pile of unfolded metal chairs.

The lost boy gave him a single nod as he approached.

There was a table with snacks, too, but it was near the normal center of attention: Saotome Ranma. The pigtailed boy was caught in Shampoo's vice like grip, and withering under an enraged stare courtesy of Akane. Genma, after checking in on his son, quickly headed to the table to appropriate some food, and talk to Soun who had anticipated where to rendezvous with his old friend.

Most of the gang were all here, safe and sound, and he started to feel a little silly for worrying so much about them. It wasn't really his style, and how annoying was it that when he finally worked himself up into caring for a bunch of people, they didn't even end up getting into any real trouble. All that aggravation for what? Nothing, it seemed.

Except that Cologne was still gone, and probably dead. Happosai wasn't around either, but was he just out on his own, hiding somewhere, or gone too? He thought back to who else should have been there, but wasn't. The only other face missing, he determined, was Dr. Tofu, but there was no role saying he had to get involved at all. The doctor was a man who lived outside Nerima's chaos more often than in it.

"So what's all this about?" Mousse asked, keeping his hands in his sleeves.

Next to him, Ryouga looked up at the ceiling. "You'll find out in a minute or two. Before that, I'd like to ask you something."

The lost boy seemed a little intense, even for him. Mousse shrugged. "Sure. What?"

"I'm going to pick the biggest fight either of us have ever seen." Ryouga looked at the Chinese boy out of the corner of his eye. "Bigger than the Musk. Bigger than Saffron."

"You mean whatever killed Cologne," Mousse clarified.

Ryouga bared a big of fang. "That one… and every one like it."

"How many are we looking at?" Mousse asked, totally serious in the light of the fact that that whatever had managed to take down Cologne, was just one of many.

"Thousands," Ryouga said, slowly. Mousse flinched visibly.

"You want my help, huh?" Mousse made a dismissive grunt. "And why would I do that?"

Ryouga actually smiled, just a little. "Because you're already a target. There are only two places you can go from here. One is to a safe house in the middle of nowhere to twiddle your thumbs and waste away. The other is to come with me and fight. Really, you can die either way, but do you want them to come for you, or do you want to hunt them down?"

Mousse chuckled at the question. "Do you even have to ask?"

The lost boy nodded, slowly. "You can also go with Ranma, if you want. We both know that's where Shampoo will run to."

"Good point," Mousse said, and thought about that. Shampoo would want to fight by Ranma's side, and while Mousse could work with Ranma, he wasn't exactly keen to. Plus, it was hard watching the love of his life throwing herself at the pigtailed boy, time and time again. Could he really stand to be around that for an extended period of time? He knew, rationally, that Ranma wouldn't do anything with her, but his heart was less prudent.

"You'll still see her. We're all going to be working locally," Ryouga spoke up, as if sensing Mousse's indecision.

Mousse purposefully removed his glasses, ruining his vision.

"Yeah," was all he said.

A door opened, getting their attention, and a woman walked in. Mousse flipped his glasses on briefly, and then returned them to his sleeves. He and Ryouga walked up to the group, all of whom were congregating around this new arrival. She was fair skinned, Japanese, with plain black hair clipped professionally behind the back of her head. Like two of the men present, she wore an actual uniform.

It also drove home that this wasn't a normal JSDF operation. Rather than the expected blue, the coat or tunic and trousers were olive grey. The woman had hers buckled, displaying two stars to the left of her chin, but the two men wore it loosely. Their turndown-collar shirts were white, and both also wore identical black neckties. Unlike with the JSDF uniform, the belts were also black, and the service caps were the same olive grey as the coats they wore. All three also wore black gloves.

The two men saluted the woman, and she returned the gesture.

"Welcome, all of you," she began to speak, in a soft and rather plain female voice. She didn't sound very commanding, but everyone dropped what he or she was doing and listened when it became obvious this newcomer was in charge.

"My name is Lieutenant Commander Noriko Yasuda. I have been fully apprised of your situation, and have accepted responsibility for the introduction of all thirteen of you into our organization. I see quite a few confused faces, so let me clarify for most of you what we do here."

She tapped the metal stars on her collar. "Those of you who assumed this was a military outfit were half correct. We do not operate under the jurisdiction of any one nation state. We work for UNETCO: the United Nations Extraterrestrial Combat Organization. Several of you have seen these aliens firsthand, and others have had contact of the first or second kind. I will not waste time attempting to convince you of the existence of these creatures, and will simply tell you to accept it as fact."

"We have been engaged with these unwelcome visitors since 1999, and a base was set up and made operational here in Japan in March of 2000. I assumed command here fourteen months ago. Due to recent events, we have come to the conclusion that the aliens are making an ongoing and systematic attempt to abduct or assassinate high caliber martial artists throughout this hemisphere. The two largest attacks have coincided with terror attacks in other areas, thus diverting the attention of UNETCO."

"We are fortunate that the aliens underestimated the tenacity and resourcefulness of their quarry, and that a number of you escaped and returned to Earth. However, for those who are considered compromised and in danger of abduction, we can only offer two possibilities. The first is confinement to a Safe Haven Facility in Oregon, on the west coast of the United States. We have an operational Mind Shield there and housing where you will stay with other at risk personnel to wait out the war."

"Alternatively, you can join UNETCO in an active capacity, here in Japan. For most of you, this means you will enter combat operations, or provide additional training for soldiers on base. Aside from occasional leave, you will eat, sleep, and live on our base in the mountains. Quarters will be provided for your immediate family, and you can continue your education, which may or may not include officer's training. You will also receive a salary contingent on your rank and services rendered."

She took a deep breath, and let the group digest what she had said so far before finishing. "Six of you have already agreed to work with us here in Japan, and I have spoken before with Mr. Tendo, Mr. Saotome, and Mr. Hibiki. I wish to create not just two active duty squads of exceptional individuals, but also establish a dojo in the base, under the supervision of Mr. Tendo, who has told me he wishes for one of his daughters to assist him. The other two, who I have been told are not martial artists, will be employed in other areas as interns."

Ranma, Ryouga, and Soun all stepped forward, and took up positions next to the UNETCO officers, with the two younger martial artists on the sides and the Tendo patriarch in the middle. There was surprisingly little discussion. Genma was only a few steps behind his old comrade, and the Tendo sisters quickly joined him.

Mousse spared Shampoo a look, as the girl seemed to be hesitating.

Then, Ukyou and Konatsu headed towards Ranma, and Shampoo sprinted to keep up. Mousse shook his head. He truly doubted Ranma would be able to control his 'harem' any more than before, and if he caused chaos on a military base, there would definitely be hell to pay. He had a bad feeling in general about that whole setup. On the other hand, it would be pretty funny to see Ranma get in over his head.

With a suffering sigh, he walked up to Ryouga, where one of the guests he hadn't recognized already stood with his arms crossed. He looked to be about Ranma's age, but was built more like the lost boy (with a white bandanna even), and already seemed to have the military look down pact with black combat boots and camouflage cargo pants. He even had a military style belt, and a black sleeveless muscle shirt.

"Mousse," he said to the stranger, as a small introduction.

"Kumon," the boy replied curtly. "Ryu Kumon."

"Well," Mousse thought to himself with a smirk. "At least he's not Pantyhose Taro…"

"Hold!" Kuno, the left alone and standing by himself, held up his right hand. "To take all this as truth is difficult, even for so sympathetic a soul as Tatewaki Kuno. Surely, it seems at first this is an elaborate and fanciful jest, yet at the same time… who is to say that the unfathomable depths of the universe beyond our tiny globe are devoid of life? You tell me now that these creatures come not in peace, but with malicious intent?"

"Very well!" Kuno whipped out his bokken and held it dramatically in the air. "The challenge, if true, is accepted! As is the chance to get away from abominable classes and graduate elsewhere!"

He headed towards the group, but couldn't seem to decide where to go. He wanted to fight, that much was obvious, but he didn't want to do it with Ranma. Then there was the natural inclination to follow Akane around, wherever she ended up. Before he took the chance to curse the fates or anything similar, Ryouga snapped his fingers loudly.

"Kuno," he said, simply.

"Very well!" the swordsman proclaimed, as he made his choice. "I will lead you three. You may address me as Kuno-sempai."

"This guy for real?" Ryu asked, and there was a dangerous, challenging edge to it.

"Very well," Noriko spoke up again, apparently pleased with the turnout. She inclined her head three times, to Soun first, and then to Ryouga and Ranma. "I have high expectations for all of you. We will leave for Seiran Mountain immediately, and there you will be sworn in. Now, since none of you have served in any armed force or police unit, I will say this…."

Her dark brown eyes narrowed a fraction. "I am well aware of the trouble you have caused in your home town. I will not have a break in disciple under my command. I want to make that crystal clear. Any violations of protocol, any damage to base property or facilities, and I will have your balls on a platter. This isn't high school. I won't make you wait in the halls with buckets. Step out of line, and I will hammer you into the ground! That goes for you girls as well as the boys. Understood?"

The suddenness of it all surprised the assembled teenagers, but Ryu and Ryouga were the first to recover. Both bowed their heads.

"Yes, ma'am!" they chorused. The others quickly muttered similar phrases of agreement and compliance.

"Good," Noriko said, her tone more pleased but still strict. "As UNETCO Regional Commander, you will report to me, or to the designated officer I have assigned to you. For the next month, you will be under the direct supervision of a mentor, after which I hope to have two fully operational squads ready for active duty. During that time, you will undergo Pedagogical Instruction, and will be required to keep a daily log. Once a week, you will submit this log to your mentor for review. It is my hope you will learn from them as they learn from you."

"You're my soldiers now! Kill for me, and I'll treat you as well as I'm able. You all may even live to see the day when we're hailed as heroes." She smirked as if amused by their veiled anxiety, and saluted them. "Welcome to XCOM."


	12. Strength in Numbers III

Seiran Mountain

The Hide Mountains rose and crested like white-water waves, all the way to the black outline of the horizon. The helicopters flew low to the ground, in eerie silence, and like before many of the passengers took the opportunity to take in the view. For a martial artist of their dedication and inclination, training in the mountains was almost second nature (and for one of them, it was practically a state of nature), yet none had seen them like this before.

They were past the more heavily forested regions, and into the higher, craggy peaks crowned with snow year round. The detail and exact lay of the ground was impossible to discern in the darkness, which stretched like a veil. The flight, however, was not long, and one after another, the helicopters dipped down on approach to a hidden landing field.

Within the darkness below, something opened wide, like a mouth. Seiran Mountain did not exist on any official maps, but a half century ago the Imperial Army had dug it out to serve as a bombproof hangar and weapon depot. After the war, the Americans had cleaned it out, and left it to its own devices – it was too out of the way to effectively deal with in any other means, and the road that had led out so far into the mountains had ceased to be functional decades ago.

XCOM had leased it, and erased the relevant records from public databases. The aliens could not only steal information remotely from electronic libraries and the like, but they had sympathizers and would-be quislings to aid them. Most of those fools were opportunistic dupes, ignorant of their Master's true aims, and over the years the aliens had infiltrated (through coercion, mind control, or outright replacement) a great many organizations and even governments.

The gaping maw of Seiran welcomed them in, and the view transitioned suddenly from a stark mountain-scape to an expanse of hangars and sophisticated equipment. Two saucer shaped craft, larger looking than the helicopters, sat unobtrusively in landing 'nests' with servicing equipment running along the floor of the hangar spaces. Their surfaces were smooth, save for semi-regular protrusions pointing downward and outward that faintly glowed purple. Two men in orange vests or uniforms stood nearby, inavertedly juxtaposing themselves with the otherworldly craft, and also providing a size contrast. The saucer seemed to be at least 20 meters in diameter.

As the helicopters flew deeper into the hangar space, a red "X" came into view, emblazoned on the saucer craft. It was followed by two numbers: "16" and… amazingly… a small silhouette of a woman holding a very long rifle or musket, with "Magic Bullet" below it in English. Further into the hangar space, past the saucers, two more conventional looking aircraft were fueled up and ready, their own ultra-high technology and cutting edge design overshadowed by the genuine human piloted flying saucers in their company.

The hangar doors closed and sealed behind the landing transport helicopters, fully immersing the new arrivals in this surreal world of human and reverse engineered alien technology. The hangar alone was incredible and difficult to take in all at once. It was rectangular, and perhaps five hundred meters in length, while the ceiling towered high enough to easily accommodate a building like the Tendo Dojo within it. Catwalks and service machinery snaked around the man made cavern, as did pipes and storage areas for yet more equipment.

A short distance from where the helicopters landed, a large antechamber or alcove housed at least eight small tanks, which seemed impossible for human to actually enter and drive. More amazingly, four of the vehicles weren't on treads, but instead seemed to have the lower body of a UFO, sliced through the middle. They sat, like their larger cousins, in a cushion built like a nest, made of silver and black metal coils. Another man wearing an orange vest seemed to be working on one of the craft, as he had tools and a computer with him as he sat by its side.

The sixteen arrivals exited their respective aircraft, and all but three of them looked around in undisguised wonder. Even Ranma, Ryouga and Soun, who had spoken previously with UNETCO officers, had not yet been inside Seiran itself. For the two young martial artists who had seen El Dorado, and many of the amazing wonders of that place, Seiran was impressive simply by its size, and the fact that it existed in secret not on some distant continent, but here in the heart of Japan.

One by one, they were directed to the unisex decontamination facility.

That is, after their genders were all agreed on.

"Hey! What about 'men only' don't you understand, lady?" Ryu had all but pounced on Konatsu when he demurely entered the strip down room behind the other men. It hadn't helped matters that the male kunoichi was wearing a female kimono very convincingly, with his hair secured in place with pins.

"Watch your tone, knave!" Kuno pushed the shorter, but undeniably stronger, Ryu Kumon out of the way, as he gently held Konatsu's hands. "My fine lady, you must wait outside, lest the sight of manly flesh drive you to prurience…"

Konatsu just blinked. "Excuse me?"

Behind Kuno, Ranma, Ryouga and Mousse were already undressing, or in the case of the latter, unwinding loop after loop of chains on the floor from the recesses of his robes. Ryu suddenly loomed over Kuno, cracking his knuckles.

"Oh," Konatsu finally said, his delicate lips making a perfect 'o.' "I see the problem!"

"You do?" Kuno asked, happily.

"You better!" Ryu growled.

"Don't worry!" With a single flourish, the pretty would be female ninja reached up, and bared her… manly chest. "I'm a guy!"

Kuno quickly went from perversely excited, to crestfallen.

"Not another one…" he whispered.

Ryu, far less acclimated to weirdness in general, just shot Konatsu a disgusted look, and backed off. When he did strip down, however, it was with a measure of hesitation and suspicion towards the soon de-clothed ninja boy. Kuno, apart from being disappointed, ultimately made more of a fuss about leaving his wooden bokkensword behind. He was essentially powerless without it, or a similar object, but they had been assured that they would get their clothes and possessions back later after they had been officially sworn in.

After stripping, the men were put through wash down and rapid drying. To the relief of those with Jyusenkyou curses, the decon spray of mist was warm, and kept that way by the softly shining lights above them. After being scanned by a medical device and giving a blood sample from their index finger, each of them entered the last isolated room to get changed.

By the time the five girls were done, and changed, their male counterparts had been milling around for a few minutes. Soun and Genma were busy discussing their future plans for the dojo, while Ranma tried to fill Mousse in on any information about the adventure he'd had on the alien ship that the nearly blind Amazon boy hadn't already heard. Ryouga stood by while the conversation happened, present but not really accounted for, feeling rather like a third wheel while Ranma talked. Kuno sat by himself, pretending not to listen, and Ryu leaned against a wall also by himself, sending the occasional strange look at Konatsu, still not entirely convinced the ninja was on the 'straight and narrow.'

Then the girls emerged, wearing much the same clothes that the men had been given: olive gray pants, black leather loafers a half size too large, but comfortable, a black belt with a steel buckle, and a white turndown-collar shirt. There was a strange conformity that hit just then, as the normally exotic ensemble of outfits the Nerima Wrecking Crew normally wore became replaced by uniform professional attire.

For a few silent seconds, everyone just looked at everyone else. Ukyou without her chef's outfit or gear, Shampoo wearing normal clothes, Mousse without his robes, Kuno without his bokken, Ranma and Ryouga looking even more like each other than normal (especially without the latter's bandannas) – it seemed to take a little while to sink in. It was almost as if a line had been crossed, and they hadn't even fully realized it until after the fact.

A door opened, and one of the men from before, the chosen subordinates of the base commander, beckoned them to follow him to be sworn in. The group walked in relative silence, looking around at their new… home? It seemed like it was to be something like that well into the foreseeable future. After the amazing sights in the hangar, this next tour was extremely mundane. There were offices of metal and glass, arranged neatly, including people working in front of computers, with books on tables and pictures on walls. It was a sight out of any business place in the world.

At the end of the hall, they entered a large boardroom, with a detailed map of the world on the longest wall, and the Seal of UNETCO on the adjacent one opposite the door. Another wall had the flags of more than a dozen nations hanging from it, one after another, the Japanese flag wedged between that of the United States and Russia. The commander was there waiting for them, and they lined up in two rows, raised their hands over their hearts, and repeated after her in Japanese to defend the Earth, to fight for Humanity, to respect the Charter of UNETCO, and to subject themselves to military regulations and the chain of command.

Thirteen stapled sheets of papers rested in front of thirteen chairs around the central table, each one on top of a manila folder. They were walked through the paperwork, signing and writing where appropriate before leaving the papers in a pile in the middle of the table one on top the other. And that, they were told, was that. Inside their respective manila folders, they found information on where their quarters were, guidelines on what they were allowed to have and what they weren't, documents about medical fitness and related programs, basic information about the base and UNETCO, and at the end of it all: a picture of their individual mentor along with a short description, and a small rank insignia for themselves.

As everyone looked through what they had been given, one of them raised a hand.

"Ah, Mrs. Yasuda, I mean, ma'am." Ranma seemed to struggle with how to address someone, for the first time anyone but Genma could remember. "Commander, sir, what about our curses?"

Mousse, Shampoo and Genma all gave Ranma a surprised look that he would mention it so suddenly and openly, but quickly realized the possibilities of getting cured. They all faced Lieutenant Commander Yasuda with open and obvious hope and anticipation. Ryouga just sat still, facing his papers but letting his eyes wander. For her part, the XCOM base commander treated it professionally, and completely overlooked any initial unfamiliarity with protocol on the part of her new soldiers.

"There is actually rather extensive documentation regarding this _Jyusenkyou_ curse several of you have," she explained. "We have placed inquiries and orders with the Preservation Society that runs the Nature Preserve the springs are in. As you requested, we should have the water here in five to seven more business days. You can do whatever you need to do then."

The cursed martial artists, even Ryouga, perked up at that, and exchanged smiles.

"Congratulations, Ranma!" Akane was more vociferous, from where she sat next to her father and Ryouga. Her heartfelt congratulations, as if he was all but cured already, set off the other girls lest they be left out.

"That's right, Ranchan!" Ukyou added, quickly. Of course, she was sitting to his right, like her namesake. "Soon you'll be cured!"

"Shampoo so happy for you!" She took it one step further, and reached over to hug him. He seemed to make a token effort to avoid it, but with her sitting to his left, it was largely futile. Just a few feet away, Mousse started to visible fume.

"We get married once we back to normal, yes?" she cooed.

"Don't joke about stuff that ain't funny!"

"Hands off Ranchan, you Chinese hussy!"

"Raaaanma… can't you get her to stop that?"

"Oh dear, here we go again…"

"Saotome! Shampoo!" This time, a new voice cut into the usual round robin of Nerima infighting. Noriko Yasuda never really raised her voice, but she spoke with the deadly inflection of someone with both authority and the weight of real life-or-death responsibilities for the lives of millions on her shoulders. Shampoo bit back a snap at Akane, and all eyes returned to the woman they had agreed to serve.

"I will not have a… spectacle… take place during a meeting. Your personal affairs are your own, both of you, but I will not allow it to compromise your combat effectiveness. If necessary, I will separate your group to maintain order. Our base in Dongchuan in China is also planning to create a Special Martial Artist squad…"

"Shampoo," Ranma quickly said, and he lifted her arms off from around him. "Let go. Please."

Shampoo hesitated only a second, out of surprise. She extradited herself, and returned to her seat. She seemed to be conflicted, between her sense of independence, superiority, and defiance, and her more rational side, the one that had Amazon adherence to the decrees of one's (female) elders strongly imprinted into it.

"Shampoo sorry," she finally said, clearing her throat. "It not happen again."

Noriko nodded, and the matter was (or seemed to be) settled. "Is there anything else?"

Genma didn't bother to raise his hand like his son had done, but he did speak somewhat guardedly. "There is the question of my wife, Nodoka…"

"At risk married couples are given appropriate housing, yourself included," the commander replied, and by her tone she obviously thought he should have read this in the documentation already. "Your son has already argued that she is in danger, given that the enemy knows your name and likely suspects you are alive. We have been watching your house for several days, and we will bring her here immediately."

Genma lowered his head deeply, for the second time in as many days. "The Saotome family expresses its deepest thanks."

"Anything else at the moment?" Commander Yasuda looked around the group, and satisfied that things were in order she tapped a recessed button on the table. "Lieutenant. They're ready."

A second later, the door to the conference room opened, and one of the men from before stood by himself. He was not a large or imposing figure, a little shy of six feet tall with brown eyes and dark brown, slightly curly, hair cut short. On his collar, he wore a gold bar and three stars. For the first time, he spoke, with a quiet tone and an unusual accent.

"Hello everyone," he said, sounding friendly enough, but didn't bow. "My name is Captain Joshua Ben-Solomon. Your other mentors will meet up with you after you've had your first trip on the Reading Rainbow – the Pedagogical Psionic Interface. We'll be putting in English reading, writing, and speaking, along with a few maps and some other information. It'll really help you find your way around the base. This way."

Leaving the room, Ranma couldn't resist leaning over to Ryouga and quipping, "You better ask 'em for a double dose before you end up in those woods outside."

Despite seeing the comment coming from a mile away, the lost boy didn't seem to have prepared a defense. So he settled for something tried and true.

"Shut up, Ranma," he growled, but the other boy just laughed good-naturedly. Or to be more exact: it was meant to sound good naturedly, but ended up sounding more than a little snide.

Ben-Solomon took them down three levels, into what he explained was the "Psionic Research, Development and Education" wing of the base. Ranma and Ryouga already had a basic understanding of what that meant, but for the others, the Captain gave a brief description. He explained that the technology was originally alien, but had been re-engineered and adapted for human uses, and that basic sorts of information could be imprinted into the brain, though for more complex fields of study it was not as successful at imparting actual understanding of a subject. Human brains, he added, adapted to language imprinting more easily than other forms of information.

They were led, finally, to a medium-large room with a high ceiling. The walls were white, but had posters with safety information written on them in several languages, including Japanese. There were three computers along one of the walls, and a long glass case containing a multitude of labeled trays. Arrayed across the rest of the room, however, were eight beds, and each one was within a cylindrical metal tube much like a MRI machine.

It had already been decided that the eight martial artists who had active duty officer mentors should go first, followed by the others. Ranma was the first to take one of the beds, and as he tried to relax, he wondered to himself how the experience would go. He also found himself thinking back to that little mess before, in the conference room. Back on the plane, both Ryouga and Nabiki had openly doubted Ranma's ability to hold together the group he had ultimately decided to lead.

Coming from Nabiki the criticism wasn't bad, but Ryouga had been totally unsympathetic. Really, the lost boy had always been that way, but for some reason, Ranma always expected something of a more open ear and mind from him. He and Ryouga had been through a lot together, and he considered him his best friend, so why were they so often at odds, or worse: at each other's throats? Over stupid things, no less? It couldn't still be all about Akane, could it?

He just couldn't figure it out.

Regardless, in the end, Ranma had let Ryouga have Mousse and Ryu Kumon, though the circumstances around the latter had caused more than one argument. The lost one had never meet Ryu, but he had heard of him and the _Yamasenken_, and gotten it in his head that he was potentially the most useful of the local martial artists they'd run across to recruit. Ranma was of a totally different opinion. He had forced Ryu to seal the _Yamasenken_ school of techniques, and didn't want to be put in a position where he had to renounce that. Moreover it was highly debatable if Ryu Kumon was in the sort of clear and present danger that made picking him up and encouraging him to fight… well: ethical.

They hadn't actually resolved it amongst themselves. Instead, Ryouga had written up a personal addendum to the list they submitted. Ranma had no idea what he had said in that note, but it was obviously enough to convince XCOM to track down the impoverished and dojo-less fighter and shuttle him over to be put into the martial arts program. Frankly, Ranma was unhappy with the whole arrangement surrounding Ryu, but at this point there was nothing that could be done about it.

Needless to say, Ryouga had been more than willing to pick up Ranma's enemies to work with. Mousse had been another point of contention, since Ranma wasn't personally opposed to fighting alongside the Chinese boy, and he felt he could trust him by now. On the other hand, Nabiki had been right about Shampoo, and all his fiancées. They wouldn't leave him alone, and they wouldn't work with Ryouga if he wasn't there (except maybe Ukyou, but the lost boy was doubtful of that).

That left him to "baby-sit" the two girls: Ukyou and Shampoo. Ryouga had agreed to pick up Kuno and let Ranma have Konatsu, which gave his team a semi solid backbone at least. On paper, his squad was weaker than Ryouga's, but had the potential to work better. Konatsu, despite the connotations of being a kunoichi ninja, was a team player; eager to please and be accepted, plus he had some nice skills. Ukyou and Shampoo were also individually weaker than, for example, Kuno going all out or Mousse at even half effort, but he had seen them work together before.

Ryouga's team, on the other hand, was all over the place. Ranma had doubts that Kuno could be trusted, much less relied upon to follow directions and orders, and while Mousse and Ryouga could work together, it was usually only a matter of time before they ended up butting heads over something. Ryu was the anomaly; he was a loner like Ryouga normally was, which could work to that team's benefit or detriment. Then there was Ryouga Hibiki himself, who had the bloody-minded determination to form a team to fight in his new crusade against the aliens that killed Akari, but had no experience in that respect.

Really, Ryouga had the social skills and diplomatic ability of a retarded porcupine.

It was almost unfortunate that both he and the lost boy had been assigned to lead their squads, but none of the others had the "motivation." None of them had really seen, first hand, what the invaders from the stars were capable of. Realistically, Ranma gave the whole endeavor a fifty-fifty chance of blowing up in their faces.

Then there was Akane… he didn't even want to dwell on that. His thickheaded fiancée had, typically, decided that she wanted to fight, too, even though she was plainly not ready and under-qualified in comparison to almost everyone else. He had taken the somewhat cowardly route of letting Mr. Tendo explain to his daughter how she could continue her training while she worked in the new dojo. She had accepted that decision under pressure from her family, but Ranma secretly hoped she never got the chance to risk her life like he was going to be doing.

Not that he valued her life more highly than Ukyou's or Shampoo's, but that she was much more likely to get killed or wounded. She was plenty strong, and she could kick like a mule on PCP, but her actual physical endurance was pretty low. She wasn't used to being hit or beat on, and she couldn't even use her _ki_ to protect herself from damage, which also meant she didn't have the ability (yet) to form proper mental defenses.

He tried to turn his mind away from Akane, and back to Ukyou and Shampoo. He knew things couldn't go on like they had before, with all the girls fighting over him. On the other hand, he didn't want to lose any of them as friends, or feel the sense of failure that came when he imagined them leaving him for someone else (except Kodachi, who he would happily pawn off for a plate of yakidofu). It was a strange thing, wanting them to stop chasing after him, but not wanting them to think of him as any less of a man. He supposed what he wanted was for them to still be attracted to him, but not to really love him, at least not openly.

It was a mess: his mess. Alone with his thoughts, he knew he loved Akane more than his old childhood friend Ukyou or the exotic Chinese Amazon Shampoo. He knew it. But he just couldn't find it in him to say it. He could just tell they'd fly off in a rage, or even try and take their anger and pain out on Akane, who couldn't defend herself against either of them if they got serious. More than even his own distaste at "losing" two of them, he didn't want to risk losing Akane like he almost had back at Jusendo, when Saffron had nearly killed her.

It was around then that Ranma realized he couldn't feel his body. At some point, he had slipped off to a light sort of sleep. It was very strange, how it had happened without him really noticing, but he could feel his thoughts drifting and coming back together, before – like a switch – something in his brain turned on. The blackness turned blue, followed by a small rotating hourglass.

A second later, a picture appeared, and then some writing. Ranma couldn't remember when, or if, he'd ever had a dream with text in it before. The words "Please Wait" flashed several times in rapid succession, along with the background, before settling into a black and red scheme. Then it changed, and a smaller block of text appeared, like a window on a computer at school. It was a privacy statement, and a consent form, and… it was far too long and convoluted to read through (much less understand).

He mentally agreed, and the screen disappeared and was replaced another picture. This was an installation screen (he wasn't computer illiterate, after all), showing a download and a progress bar. A second later, the window under that began to scroll downwards rapidly, far too fast to see anything in it clearly, and next to that he saw a picture of what had to be his brain, with some parts a cool blue, and others degrees of red.

There was nothing otherwise interesting about it, and so he just sort of waited. Normally, stuff happened in dreams, one event after another as if the brain itself had a naturally short attention span. So just waiting was rather annoying, but still, the download bar was soon full, and then he just had to wait for the slower progress bar. There was nothing to occupy himself with, but at least the whole process seemed to only take a few minutes.

A screen popped up, announcing it was done. When he thought about that, it closed itself, and then another disclaimer appeared. He repeated what he had done before, and it started up another installer. This one, however, only took a few seconds. Ranma closed it when it was done, and another small screen came into being, asking if he wanted to wake up. It also had a digital clock with the time on it, moving much faster than normal.

Similar to before, the instant he thought about wanting to wake up, Ranma opened his eyes and looked up at the smooth white plastic surface of the MRI-like machine he'd entered. He shook his head and groaned, feeling little dizzy, like he'd spun around a few too many times. Other than that, he felt pretty good, and as soon as he was confident of his balance he reached under the platform supporting his back, and found a small handle. Squeezing it, the small bed retracted out of the metal and plastic enclosure, and he slid off it without even wondering how he'd known to find and use the release lever in the first place.

He did immediately notice that a few people were up and about, and that a few were missing. His father and Soun Tendo were gone, but Kasumi, Nabiki, and Akane were present, as were a large number of other people. The only one of them that he recognized was immediately was Ben-Solomon from before, yet if actual recognition eluded him, he did find himself strangely knowing their names. The feeling was almost out of body, like knowing something before you learned it.

He heard groans and other sounds nearby, and saw Ukyou emerge from her Pedagogical Psionic Interface Chamber. That he suddenly knew the name off hand like that also came as a mild surprise. Seeing Kuno scratching his head and mumbling something to himself, Ranma thought about where he was, and suddenly he felt as if he had lived in the base for years. He couldn't recall what places looked like, but he could remember roughly where those places where and how to get there.

"Ranma?" Akane asked, keeping her voice low as she walked up to him. "Are you ok? How do you feel?"

"Yes," Nabiki added, trailing behind her younger sister. "How was it?"

"Weird. Just… weird." Ranma took in the appearance of the three Tendo sisters. They wore the same clothes as before, except that Nabiki now sported a black jacket and Kasumi wore a white bow to keep her hair in place. "How long was I out?"

"All night," Akane replied, and Nabiki clarified.

"Eight and a half hours," the middle Tendo said with an amused chuckle. "The rest of us went to sleep and woke up an hour ago."

"Akane Tendo! After emerging from such an uncanny slumber, how joyous it is to see you again! To hold you again in these arms of mine…!" Kuno never got past those words and the crushing embrace he'd seized her with. Akane's fist soundly planted in his face; he groaned and fell to the floor.

"Ranma!" This time, it was Ryouga. Ranma turned partly around to see the lost boy and the others heading towards him as a slower pace.

"Hey. Do you understand what I'm saying?" Ryouga asked, slowly, in English.

"As much as I usually do," Ranma replied, and smiled at his friends. "Everyone of you guys get that?"

"All those years of English classes, wasted!" Ukyou shook her head sadly. "With machines like that, I bet you could finish a year of school in a week."

Mousse seemed to agree. "Truly impressive. I just wonder what the limits of it are, if there are any. Did anyone actually read that disclaimer we agreed to?"

"I didn't…" Shampoo volunteered, speaking uncharacteristically quietly. Then, sure that her new vocabulary was free of the errors that plagued her Japanese, she smiled and continued more confidently. "It was in Chinese for me, too, but I think it was either tailored for us individually, or... maybe we all saw it differently, in our native languages?"

"Both seem likely," Ryu said, also smiling a bit, caught up in the new experience. "I wonder if you could train martial arts with these machines?"

Konatsu laughed girlishly. "This is so neat, right Miss Ukyou?"

Kuno suddenly popped up, showing no sign of having just eaten a five-fingered sandwich, and striking a dramatic pose. "Yes! Truly a magnificent technology indeed! However, there is also the matter of how this process affects the mind to consider. No doubt the puissant personality of Tatewaki Kuno can survive any attempted deception, but the same may not be true for more corruptible souls…"

"Amazing how you can be perceptive and idiotic from one sentence to the next," Mousse replied with a smirk, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose.

"Alright. We're all impressed. Let's move on," Ryouga cut off Kuno before he could make an angry retort. "We have company we're rudely ignoring."

"Quite," Kuno settled for saying. Standing quietly near the door and assortment of men and women, eight in all, ended their own quiet conversations and faced the Nerima Crew. Their expressions ranged from unhappy to relaxed and friendly. They were the mentors, and with the benefit of the pictures from before still fresh in the minds, it only took a few seconds for each of them to recognize who they had been paired with.

"Now that I have your attention," Ben-Solomon spoke in English this time, and he was plainly more familiar and comfortable with that language than he was with Japanese. "The Commander has high hopes for you kids, and she convinced me to let you all benefit from the experience of these seven fine individuals, most of whom are from Seiran Mountain's first, second, third and fourth combat squads, all under my command. The exception is the man to my right, but I won't hold that against him. His name is Captain Bruce Banks, and he, too, has charitably volunteered to help whip you boys and girls into shape."

"Bruce, you may as well go first," Ben-Solomon said, his voice a little lower. "I believe you've got the pigtailed kid."

Hearing that, Ranma stepped forward, and held out his hand a little nervously. "I'm Ranma. Ranma Saotome. Of the Saotome School of Anything Goes Martial Arts."

His mentor was an American, so he figured a handshake would be expected. Bruce Banks was a large man in his thirties with a bald head and a well trimmed black moustache. His size suggested he may have played football in his youth, and he shook Ranma's hand firmly.

"Pleased ta meet cha," the older man spoke with a bit of a southern inflection, still Ranma easily followed what he said, despite being new to the English language. "Captain Bruce Banks, formerly of DEVGRU – United States Navy Special Warfare Development Group."

"Hibiki?" Ben-Solomon prompted the lost boy to come forward. Ryouga seemed a little more relaxed than Ranma in meeting his mentor, and the two shook hands briefly.

"Ryouga Hibiki," the martial artist introduced himself simply.

"Captain Joshua Ben-Solomon. Formerly of _Shin Bet_ and _Mossad_."

After the first two, the rest of the Nerima gang took the initiative to meet up with their mentors as well. Ukyou's mentor was a woman with bright blue eyes and short blonde hair that swept to her left and covered her forehead. She was tall, but slim, and looked German or at least Nordic.

"Ukyou Kounji," the younger girl said, not surprised they were all paired up by gender. "Okonomiyaki chef and martial artist."

The woman greeted Ukyou with a warm smile. "Sergeant Kimberly Lofquist, formerly of the _Ordningspolisens Nationella Insatsstyrka_. The Swedish National Rapid Response Unit."

Given how Mousse and Shampoo were both paired with the two Japanese mentors in the group, it also became obvious that the pairings were designed to cross ethnicity and cultures as well. Mousse's mentor was a barrel-chested Japanese man with a serious expression and a full head of plain black hair. He seemed to be all business, which suited the Chinese boy just fine.

"Mousse. Hidden Weapons and Bird Style Kung Fu."

"Lieutenant Raizo Tsuchihashi," his new mentor spoke in a sharp, curt voice. "Japan Civil Aviation Bureau, Flight Inspection Section and _Tokushu Kyūshū Butai_, Fukuoka unit Special Assault Team."

Shampoo's handshake was a little awkward, but genuine. "Shampoo. Chinese Amazon Tribe."

"Sergeant Linda Kinoshida," the woman seemed only a little more amiable than Tsuchihashi, but then she smiled a bit and released Shampoo's hand. Despite looking mostly Japanese, her hair was a lighter brown than Ukyou's, and her eyes were the same shade. Her hair was medium length, and clipped to run functionally between her shoulders. "Served in Kuwait, back in 91. PSYOPS for two years, Bosnia in 96 and 97, and then took a crack at Detachment-Delta before XCOM picked me up."

Shampoo had heard of those places, of course, but she hadn't really ever imagined meeting anyone from a genuine war zone. A woman no less! Her mentor was Japanese and American, but she had seen real fighting, and Shampoo found herself quite happy with who had been assigned to her.

"Ryu Kumon." Also seemed to approve of his new mentor. "Of the Reformed Style Kumon Dojo."

"Piotr Karpov, UNETCO Sergeant," Piotr was another large man, almost typically Russian, with plain brown hair that ran straight down from the crown of his head, and a heavy set almost square jaw. For all that, he had friendly brown eyes and an indescribably approachable manner. "I was in _Alfa_ until 1991, then did private security work. In 1998, I was asked to participate in a special attack unit within the 41st Army to defend the Transbaikal. The aliens were too strong for us then, and in 2000 I joined UNETCO. It is rewarding work. You will like it here I think!"

Konatsu, unlike the others, did bow to his new mentor, a black haired man with a Mediterranean complexion. He was clean-shaven and relatively young, but a small scar under his lower lip on the left side marred his otherwise good looks. His black eyes and expression were intense, but not necessarily intimidating. He returned an appropriately sized small bow, and the ninja genius introduced himself.

"My name is… Konatsu, of the Sexy Tea House School of kunoichi ninjutsu," he said, a little shyly. "Pleased to meet you, sir."

"So formal," the man replied, obviously a little amused. "Name's Sergeant Feretti. Mario Feretti. _Comando Carabinieri Antidroga_ and _Gruppo Intervento Speciale_."

Kuno, not surprisingly, was the last. He seemed to scrutinize his mentor for some time, while the other man did likewise. Tatewaki was fairly tall himself, and his assigned tutor was just about eye level: a dour looking fellow with entirely plain looks. His hair was somewhat sparse, and just a regular brown, neither very dark nor light, and it hung limply over his forehead. His expression looked bored, as if he wasn't looking ahead to the chore he'd been encouraged to volunteer for.

Finally, Kuno bowed once, and extended his hand. "I am Tatewaki Kuno, heir to the House of Kuno, aged 19. Among some, I am known as the Blue Thunder of Kendo."

"Right," the other man took his hand, and gave it a single firm shake up and down. "Sergeant Jon Hanley, Royal Marines, two tours British Special Air Service SAS."

Two by two, mentors headed off with their charges, talking to them about what they had in mind for their training, and what sort of improvements they expected. The Nerima crew were all extraordinary physical specimens, but they still had a lot to learn about equipment, firearms, base facilities, and of course, the strengths and weaknesses of their new enemy. Only with the basics down could the advanced work, including admittance into the base Psi Lab for Psionic Training, begin.

Ryouga was the last to leave only because his mentor stayed behind to set up the Pedagogical Psionic Interfaces for Nabiki, Kasumi, and Akane. Shortly after almost everyone had left, Genma and Soun finally made their entrance, and Ryouga listened as the girls filled them in on what they had overheard. Mostly, they were excited about everyone being paired up with an adult, and the fact that the others had learned fluent English in eight hours.

Ryouga had even obliged when Akane brought him over to show her father his new proficiency in a foreign language. A year ago, the attention would have left him stuttering and bemused, even after he had 'given up' on getting the youngest Tendo daughter to reciprocate his feelings for her. Now, he couldn't find it in him to really care. Oh, he still had feelings for Akane, and he even still had a great fondness for the Tendo family in general, but his drive was elsewhere.

It was on his martial arts, and on how he would get his 'team' to work together effectively. He couldn't do it alone. He couldn't get his revenge alone. Mousse, Ryu, even Kuno… they would be extensions of his hate for the aliens that had killed Akari. And if the tidal wave of aliens attacking the Earth never abated, he would content himself with drowning in a sea of black and green blood. Akari had asked him to be happy, but without her, he had nothing.

Nothing except one last reason to live.

He listened, and said words, but it was like he was only there by proxi. They were so enthralled by the amazing learning machine they were about to use. Ryouga resisted chiding them – the interface, like all the advanced technology of XCOM, was only useful in as much as it could be used to defend the Earth, and destroy the Enemy. Some of the others had mentioned the legalese they had agreed to while in the machine, and Nabiki (who already had a basic grasp of English, it seemed, from high school and college) also brought that fact up.

Ryouga wasn't sure what the consent form had in it. With the fate of the planet in question, what price shouldn't be paid? He glanced at Ben-Solomon, his new mentor, and silently vowed to dedicate his every waking moment to being everything he had promised the base commander. He had said that the martial artists of Nerima could be forged into a special killing squad; an elite group of shock troops. Ranma and his girls could falter in that, but Ryouga swore he would not. Behind his eyelids, haunting his dreams, he still saw that face with hollows for eyes.

HARVEST

He would find that face, that creature, and _destroy_ it.

No matter what it took…


	13. Toy Soldiers I

The year is 2005. For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. The Nerima Wrecking Crew and their families have been relocated to Seiran Mountain, XCOM headquarters for the Far East. Assembled there, they have been given mentors to prepare them for the life or death struggled ahead…

* * *

**The Road To Cydonia **

_**Chapter V**_

_Toy Soldiers_

* * *

She had been so worried when the men had come to her door and asked for "Saotome Nodoka." With their black suits and ties they had then informed her that they were from the Department of Justice, and her heart had sunk. An honorable woman, she had confirmed that she was who they were looking for, and invited the two men inside. 

"If you don't mind me asking so abruptly," she had said, even before offering tea or a place to sit. "But what has my husband done this time?"

To her bewilderment, the men had seemed a little confused by the question, which left her with an even more troubling conclusion: that it was her dear son who was in trouble with the law. Genma, she knew, was prone to doing less than ethnical things when he felt they were necessary. She hadn't met her husband until after his apprenticeship under Happosai, but she knew the nature of the man she had her child with. Throughout the years, she had hoped and prayed that Ranma only picked up his father's more positive attributes, such as his martial arts skill and perhaps his manly sexual prowess and appetite.

A man among men was also someone respectable and someone who stood out positively amongst his peers. A criminal record could ruin her son's chances at running a good, honorable dojo. Japan was not a society that was very forgiving of crime, and people had a long memory. For government agents of the Ministry of Justice to visit her, he must have done something truly terrible.

She wondered where her sword was.

The two men, however, had politely explained that her son and husband were not in trouble, but that they had been put into protective custody. This was also strange to Nodoka. Genma alone was a formidable martial artist (and a very fast runner), and she knew her son was better still. Why would they need protective custody? Then, she had been informed that she, too, was to be relocated for an unspecified length of time, to live with her husband and son.

At this, at last, she felt a tremor of happiness run through her. After her house, small and meager as it was, had been destroyed in some sort of fight between Ranma's suitors, she and her family had lived with the Tendos. Eventually, their home had been rebuilt thanks to donations from one of the wealthier girls (Kodachi Kuno was her name – a nice girl, really), but Ranma had stayed with the Tendo family. Her son seemed very protective of them, especially after that business in China her husband had told her about with the strange 'Phoenix people.'

It had not taken long to get packed, and she had brought only the essentials like her clothes, the few luxury items the family had, and (of course) her sword. She had been a little worried at first that they wouldn't let her take the weapon, but the two men really were very amenable, and didn't seem to mind. She'd been driven to a helicopter, and waited there while they loaded several cases into it. She'd had to sit next to the pilot during the flight, and it had been quite a breathtaking trip.

Needless to say, what came after that was quite a shock!

Nodoka hummed while she cooked, really more than happy with how things had turned out. Her husband was finally working productively, helping his friend Soun to set up the new dojo for the base. He seemed to be both eager to actually have a dojo, and sadly resigned to doing actual work, like building parts of it and then having to teach. Nodoka thought she understood his feelings in the matter. He had trained Ranma, and quite well actually, and now wanted to retire and relax. She was happy and proud to see him putting effort into something again, especially if it was also of benefit to society (for once).

After all, this UNETCO organization had been kind enough to give them a place to stay, a steady and rather impressive salary, and effective shelter from these creatures her son had to fight. She and Genma had been given a room larger than normal, with a large bed in an adequately proportioned bedroom, and a living room with an attached kitchen. There was a good-sized bathroom as well, and it connected to the adjacent apartment belonging to her son.

She was currently occupied in the kitchen, checking on the oden she was preparing as the main course. It was the Japanese equivalent of chicken soup, a mélange of ingredients - in this case mostly sliced daikon and fried tofu cakes - simmered in a broth for a few hours. That part of the meal was just about done, but she also prepared some kinchaku, paper-thin slivers of chicken, shreds of leek and mushroom wrapped in a bean curd pouch, to add to the hot pot once it was served.

Her apartment (or rather, Genma and hers), connected with Ranma's both through the shared bathroom and via a sliding metal door in the living room area. There was also a door between them and their other neighbor, a quiet Caucasian man named Winston who was an engineer of some sort. Washing off her hands, Nodoka walked up to her son's door and made sure the intercom was switched on.

"Ranma?" she asked, knowing he could hear her unless he had turned off the speaker on his side of the door. "Ranma. Dinner is almost ready. Are you busy?"

He didn't reply, which meant he was probably away from the door (or just not there). Just by looking at it, and the green English words under the intercom panel, she could tell it was unlocked. So she opened it, and saw him at his desk in what passed for the living room in his apartment. His living space was smaller than the one she and Genma shared, with just a work and living room and a small bedroom. The walls were bare, and unadorned, but at least it was neat (well, she did clean it, but she figured Ranma wasn't too untidy as boys went).

Her son was at his desk, with earphones over his head, watching something on his computer and occasionally writing on a pad of paper to his right. For a second, Nodoka entertained the idea that he was watching pornography, which would be suitably manly. It would also explain the headphones: a courtesy so that others would not overhear the lustful sounds of women being pleasured by strong and virile men. Despite his several suitors, Nodoka was a little worried that her son didn't seem to be doing much with them. A fine young man his age should be well into the 'fooling around' stage of development…

Ranma looked behind him, just then seeing his mother's entrance into his room. It also afforded her a look at what he was watching, and she gasped. There was some sort of orange-faced monster, with tiny purple eyes surrounded by red. The rest of the face was like an exaggerated and elongated skull, drawn back in a horrific and perpetual teeth-bearing snarl. It reached towards whatever was taking its picture, and it started to shake, which was when Ranma quickly tapped his computer's keyboard and paused the recording.

He turned around to interpose himself between her and the monitor while he pulled down his headphones. "Dinner ready?"

"In just a few minutes, but you know your father…" she leaned a little to the side to try and see the screen again. "What was that you were watching?"

"Nothing much!" Ranma replied, blithely. "We've all got to look at a lot of film from fights, ya know? Most of the other guys have to write up some stuff about how this or that was done, and why, but me and Ryouga gotta do a lot more. We gotta analyze like what went wrong, and how we'd do stuff, and why, and it's a real pain. It'd due the day after tomorrow, but I want to finish with my notes tonight."

"I'm almost done," he quickly added with a confident grin. "Don't worry about it, ok?"

Nodoka wasn't worried about the assignment, though her heart jumped to hear him taking things so seriously and responsibly. "Are those the creatures you fought before?"

"Nah… those were called Sectoids. The ones with big eyes," Ranma explained, though he obviously didn't want his mother getting a good look at what was behind him. "These are a little different."

"More dangerous?" Nodoka asked, keeping her tone light and seemingly unconcerned.

"Kinda. They don't have mind powers… Psionics. But otherwise," he stopped himself before elaborating. "Like I said, it doesn't matter! Don't sweat it! I'll be right in!"

Nodoka was tempted to pry a little more, but the doorbell rang back in her apartment. She was tempted to let Genma get it, since he was just sitting in the bedroom watching television, but she could also see that Ranma wanted to finish his work in peace. She knew he was busy, but there would be a chance to get more information later during dinner. With a small smile she nodded, and headed back the way she came.

No doubt those creatures with the drawn back faces were more dangerous. Her son was just too transparent when it came to deception! As if he could fool his mother, even with the benefit of her not being around for most of his life! Well, she had faith that her son could handle anything thrown at him, even strange creatures from outer space. He had his friends helping him, too, and all the wondrous technology she's seen since she came to this military base.

"He'll be fine," she told herself, and then repeated it for good measure. "He'll be fine."

They were expecting company, according to Ranma. This was only the second meal she'd cooked since she'd moved in, and she'd have preferred to have another with just her slightly estranged family, but her son had insisted that she get to meet all his friends and coworkers. Opening the door, she saw a young man like her son, but with a yellow and black bandanna, and she quickly recognized him as her son's rival and good friend. Ryouga was wearing the same basic uniform as Ranma, but he also wore the olive gray tunic whereas her son preferred to go without it.

Next to the normally lost boy, a black and white dog (the fur color divided cleanly down the middle of its body) sat patiently. Nodoka had been told about that. Apparently this rival of her son's had trouble getting around, and he had actually been given permission to bring his dog onto the base. How the dog knew to get around somewhere it had never been to before, she couldn't imagine, and she had suspected her son of greatly exaggerating the situation. Surely no one had such a bad sense of direction as this so called 'lost boy.' The dog he came with sniffed the air in the direction of the kitchen, but otherwise didn't move an inch.

"Mrs. Saotome?" The boy asked, and bowed his head. "Thank you very much for the imposition."

"Oh, that's quite alright!" Nodoka replied, pleased with his politeness. "You must be Ryouga Hibiki."

"Yes," he said, and placed a large hand on his dog's head between her ears. "This is Shirokuro. Don't worry; she'll be just fine outside by the door."

"Please come in…" Nodoka stepped aside, and Ryouga stepped inside and took off his shoes. His dog walked around in a circle outside the door, and then fell to the ground with a grunt before resting her head on her paws. Nodoka watched her with an involuntary smile; she had never been fond of cats, but she had had a dog when she was younger and she was quite fond of them.

"What an interesting pattern she has," Nodoka observed. If not for the fact that she was still getting dinner ready, she'd have kneeled down and stroked the dog's soft looking coat. "What breed is she?"

"Don't really know," Ryouga admitted, sliding his shoes to a corner with Nodoka's and Genma's. "We don't breed the family dogs, we just let them take care of themselves. Shirokuro's father was a white German Shepard, a police dog, but her mother was a mix."

"I thought I saw that her eyes were different colors, too…?"

Ryouga shrugged at that. "She got that from her mother. Two of her puppies had it too. _Complete heterochromia_ it's called, but her vision is perfectly fine. She actually makes her own appointments with a veterinarian, if you can believe it. May I ask: are you a dog owner, Mrs. Saotome?"

"I used to be. My family had a Labrador when I was your age." She motioned for Ryouga to sit at the table that had been unfolded and laid out in the middle of the living room area. Genma walked in, wearing his normal white gi.

"Ah, yes, Inuyasha was his name. That dog really hated me," he grumbled, as he sat down at what passed for the head of the small table.

Nodoka replied from the kitchen, "That was because I was going to give him some bread, and you stole it, dear. Twice."

"How can you get upset over a little bread?" Genma didn't catch Ryouga's short-lived death-glare. By the time he turned his attention from his wife and the soon to be served meal to the family guest, he was off on another topic that didn't involve memories of being chased and bitten by an angry and outraged dog.

"So, Ryouga, I hear you and my boy have been kept busy," he said in a relaxed fashion. The lost boy had an easier time speaking with Soun than Genma, but in either case what exchanges of words that they had were generally about martial arts techniques or something related to that field. This wasn't so different.

"I can't speak for Ranma, but there has been a lot to do. Both of us are working towards getting an officer rank, so in addition to getting our teams to think like teams and not individuals, we've had a lot of studying as well." Ryouga paused, as Nodoka came back with three glasses of water, handing Genma his first, and then Ryouga, and then leaving the third for when Ranma showed up. They both thanked her, and took a drink of the ice water.

"I saw Ranma looking over some sort of video recording," Nodoka mentioned, steering the conversation to answer the questions her son had danced around earlier.

"Ah, that," Ryouga said, carefully putting down his glass. "This morning, we were all given a film to watch and analyze. Everyone's mentor gave them some aspect of it to write about, due in two days. Ranma and I were told to write about the methodology used during a Terror Site, summarize what we thought went wrong, and justify our conclusions."

"Terror Site?" Nodoka asked, slowly walking back to the kitchen section of the living room.

Ryouga grunted; an angry gruff sound. "UNETCO gets most of its funding from governments across the world. Sometimes, to put pressure on governments they haven't intimidated yet, the aliens will launch terror attacks on cities or villages to create panic and hysteria. 'Terror Sites put civilians in danger, and limit response options,' I read. The one you probably saw was the _Ahmadabad Massacre_, in India."

"Sounds serious," Genma commented, more than a little intrigued.

"The aliens don't survive very long on Earth, under normal circumstances," Ryouga explained. "The Ahmadabad Terror Site was the longest, and lasted for 38 hours, during which time over thirty seven thousand people were killed. According to the report, UNETCO later covered it up by calling it an industrial chemical spill and explosion."

"Thirty seven thousand? In a day and a half?" Genma asked, trying to wrap his mind around the magnitude of the slain, and the fact that such a loss of life had been covered up so effectively.

"One species of alien," Ryouga explained, understanding Genma's amazement. "Called the Snakemen, use another species, called Chryssalids, as terror agents. These creatures are parasitic, and implant their eggs in human hosts along with a powerful toxin. The egg assumes limited control of the victim, even as it devours it from the inside. Less than an hour after the infection, a fully mature Chryssalid erupts from the torso of the host, ready to repeat the process. In Ahmadabad there were so many civilians that the Chryssalids that ran out of eggs simply went from house to house, tearing people apart. By the time…"

The door to Ranma's apartment opened, and both Nodoka and Genma nearly jumped out of their skins. The latter of the two quickly covered it up by laughing a little. Her back to them, no one noticed that Nodoka was a white as a sheet. Ryouga, for his part, had never lost his neutral and jaded expression.

"Should you really be telling them that?" Ranma asked, taking a seat at the table.

Ryouga actually seemed to think about that. "You're right, actually. Some of that information was 'Need to Know,' wasn't it?"

"I'd rather you don't mention those sorts of things to my mother," Ranma then said, in English, so only Genma and Ryouga could understand him. Nodoka had not had any Pedagogical Learning, as she wasn't directly on the UNETCO payroll.

"Why?" Ryouga asked, more than a little defensively. "Doesn't she have a right to know what we're fighting for?"

"Yes, but you don't have to frighten her!"

"With the truth, you mean?"

"You're one to be talking about telling the truth, P-chan!"

"I could say the same about you, Ranko!" Ryouga grinned at the new expression on Ranma's face. He never had told his mother about his curse, instead leaving her to discover it by accident and circumstance.

"Yeah, yeah, ok," Ranma admitted, calming down. "But she's my mother, and she doesn't need to know about everything we're going to face out there. I… I just don't want her to worry, alright?"

Ryouga was going to try and make a retort, when he stopped himself. He was wrong, and Ranma was right, this time. He didn't need to make Mrs. Saotome worry, and just because he was bitter and almost eager to put the crimes of the aliens on display, didn't mean he was always justified in doing so. He took a deep breath and found his rocky island of inner calm, clinging to it like a man possessed. Akari wouldn't get her revenge if he flew off the handle and screwed things up. She wouldn't be happy if he made innocent people worry.

"Sorry. Ranma." It was still hard saying those words, but then it was over, and Ranma returned to his generally amicable self.

"S'alright, man. Just… let's keep the work stuff at work," he switched out of English, and back to Japanese as Nodoka entered with the food. "Dinner looks great, mom!"

"It does indeed…" Genma agreed with his son, already hungrily reaching for his _hashi_, or chopsticks. Seeing this, Ranma also inches his hand towards his own pair, and the two Saotome males glowered at each other over the arriving food.

"Now, now, you two!" Nodoka managed to diffuse the potential food feud with just a phrase, despite how little actual time she had spent accruing enough influence to play the mother card in disputes. If anything, a lack of experience on Ranma's part left her a little idealized, since he had such a long-term memory for select insults and offenses.

"We have a guest," she reminded them with a gentle tone. "So behave yourselves."

With the food set out and everyone seated, they clapped their hands together in thanks, and finally started on the meal. No one said much at first, but then Genma thankfully broke the silence by mentioning that the dojo was about half set up, and that they hoped to begin offering classes by the beginning of next week. Nodoka fueled the conversation, asking about this or that, and prompting him to say more. It had the dual purpose of lightening the mood around the table, and dividing Genma's attention so he didn't try and steal food from other people's plates.

Ranma and Ryouga ate in silence, except for when the pigtailed boy occasionally had a joke or remark to make about what his father was doing. The dojo he and Soun were putting together was by necessity larger than the old one, and incorporated some new features. Among the most important had been requisitioning some alien alloys (or "exotic alloys" depending on the tastes of those you ask) to line the walls. Given that they were the same materials used in alien ships, Ranma knew first hand there wouldn't be any holes kicked, punched, or blown out in this new training hall, like there had in the last one.

The rest of the evening, everyone tastefully danced around really talking about how the two young men present were advancing in their studies, or the nature of those studies. A few discrete inquiries were placed about the other members of the Nerima Wrecking Crew, which did lead to a surprising bit of news.

"Actually," Ranma said, feeling rather proud of himself, "I have an idea about that. I was thinking that we could eat with the Tendos once a week, and that we could occasionally have Shampoo or Ucchan over, too. That way none of 'em will get jealous or nothin!"

"You should eat with your whole team or none of them," Ryouga countered, not even speculating on how Ranma's plan could backfire. "That's what I think."

"Ya know, that might work for guys like you and Ryu and even Mousse," Ranma snapped, putting down his chopsticks hard on the table. "But I lived with Mr. Tendo for two years, man. I don't wanna lose touch with 'em. And if I have all the gang over at once, you know what'll happen!"

"And," Ranma continued, cutting the lost boy off. "If I eat with the Tendos, but not the others, they'll think I'm playin' favorites. Which means I gotta treat em all like that."

"That's your problem right there," Ryouga said, pointing at Ranma with his _hashi_. "You don't want to play favorites, but you only actually love Akane, not Ukyou or Shampoo. She's already your favorite."

Ryouga then added, a little dangerously, "Isn't she?"

"Look: let me handle this. I know what I'm doin!" Ranma answered while neatly avoiding the actual question.

"Whatever," Ryouga replied, dismissively. "I don't care anymore."

The two boys lapsed into a pregnant silence, and Nodoka took the opportunity to try and bring up a few topics she had been wondering about. "Ryouga, are your parents here on the base, too, or did they relocate? I'd very much like to meet them sometime."

"Relocate? My parents are lost, Mrs. Saotome," Ryouga replied, a little hotly, and quickly adjusted his tone to be more calm and respectful. "What I mean, is that I don't know where they are, and haven't seen them in two years. They have a bad sense of direction, just like I do… but as long as they don't stay in one place too long, they'll be safer, and so will the people around them. That's all I mean. Its… for the best."

Nodoka winced inwardly, wishing her son had better clarified just how bad the Hibiki family suffered from their lack of direction. She had assumed it was a small thing, like an unusual but even endearing quirk. But then Ranma loudly mentioned how Ryouga's hand had healed up, and if the other boy wanted to "break in" the new dojo with a no-holds-barred fight, and that soon led to the two taking about techniques and counter-techniques, and she could see they were both enjoying themselves.

It was a strange sort of friendship, really, but it seemed manly enough, so Nodoka just smiled and let them be. She would have to look more closely into the girls chasing after her son, however. Since Ranma didn't seem to be fooling around with them, they didn't serve much of a purpose in confusing the boy's eventual marriage. Nodoka was naturally leaning towards Akane for the role of daughter-in-law, but it didn't pay to be too hasty…

----- 


	14. Toy Soldiers II

It was morning, and Ranma had already been up for a two hours. It was time to meet up with his team, and see to the day's activities. As the elevator came to a stop, he took out his UNETCO ID card. Behind the laminated plastic cover, and the picture of him, the card stored his medical records, security clearance, and even an archive of which sensitive areas of the base he visited and when. Swiping it as he came to a sealed door, the portal opened, and allowed him outside.

The air here was crisp, cool, and clean – good mountain air. Like with the El Dorado base, parts of the Seiran Mountain Complex were above ground, though none were vital. There were a few small buildings, comprising what was officially a 'seismic and weather observatory,' and a few trails that wound down and into the deep parts of the forest. Ryouga had planned take his squad outside for morning exercises, and Ranma had decided to do the same, thinking it would be good for them all to get together again.

It would also be a good opportunity to see how his group and the lost boy's compared in a few other respects. Outside, he saw that Ryu, Mousse, Ryouga and Konatsu were already present. As asked, Konatsu had checked into the Armory before coming, and checked out a suit of personal armor and a MSG-90 sniper rifle. Part of the training requirements for both squads was to develop conventional weapons proficiency, and certification for an individual suit of personal armor (rather than one on loan).

The other three martial artists were similarly equipped, but each also sported an extremely large weapon strapped to their backs. From just being in the Armory, and from the files he'd memorized, it was the 'heavy cannon' of the XCOM arsenal: the Mechem N.T.W. anti material rifle. It was a massive weapon from South Africa, as tall as a man and almost half as heavy. It fired 20 mm cartridges, and everyone on Ryouga's squad seemed to have checked one out in addition to their Heckler & Kosh MSG-90s.

"Yo, Ryouga! Mousse!" Ranma called to them, and walked over. Konatsu quickly also headed in their direction from where he had been standing by himself.

"Ranma," Ryouga said what usually passed for a greeting from him.

"What's with the cannons, man?" he asked, feeling a little out of the loop. He also felt more than a little under armed in comparison. The MSG-90 was a sniper rifle, and not a small piece of hardware, but it looked like a peashooter in comparison to the big AMRs. A second trip to the Psionic lab had given them a basic operational knowledge of all common XCOM weaponry, even the plasma weapons, but his squad was still trying to become proficient with the rifle and handgun, much less the big guns. That meant practice.

"Its mostly for the weight," Ryouga admitted, his eyes on the camouflaged base door, which looked like nothing more than entrance to an aluminum shed set against a wall of rock. "When we get to the second shooting range, we'll take a few shots and see how we do."

"Makes sense," Ranma replied, feeling a bit better to hear that Ryouga's squad hadn't somehow mastered the rifles yet. "How're ya liking the new clothes? Kinda snug, isn't it? What'dya think, Mousse?"

Mousse seemed a bit shocked that Ranma had asked him explicitly.

"It is a bit more tight than I'm used to," the Chinese boy answered, blinked a few times without his glasses on. "But at least it isn't as constricting as I'd imagined it to be."

"He's probably curious if you can still use your Hidden Weapons," Ryouga clarified.

Mousse held up his right hand, closed it, and opened it, and a knife flicked out from out of nowhere. A second later it was gone. Ranma nodded in approval; he couldn't understand how Mousse managed the trick and that was to the Chinese boy's credit. The armor they were wearing was called the PA-3 PASGT or 'Personal Armor System for Ground Troops' – it was jet-black, and mostly form fitting, since it was designed to be unisex.

What must've made Hidden Weapons so hard to use was just how the armor was put together. PASGT armor was composed of four layers: a skin-tight, spongy sensor and environmental layer (including small coolant tubes to regulate body temperature), another layer that consisted of a non-permeable rubber-analogue, yet another made of fiber-mesh conductors and coolant fluids (to protect against the heat caused by alien plasma weaponry and XCOM incendiary weapons) and a special areogel that, when exposed to air, flowed into the breach and hardened on contact. Above that, finally, there was the 'hard' layer of replaceable .22-inch thick alien alloys plates.

How and where Mousse managed to hide a knife, Ranma couldn't imagine. Under one of the plates, maybe? He doubted even the Hidden Weapons master could unleash a downpour of bladed chains, balls with spikes, and swords wearing the PASGT armor instead of his robes, but it wouldn't be safe to underestimate what he could manage with it on. The armor was effective, too, even against simple blunt trauma, mostly because the outer layer could prevent penetration, and the lower layers could disperse the impact energy across the body.

Ryouga would probably put Pantyhose Taro's monster form to shame in terms of endurance with the armor to help him. Ranma, of course, knew all the weak spots in it where the outer layer plates weren't present, so that was some consolation in a fight. Not that there would be one. Probably. But it didn't hurt to be prepared. He glanced at Ryu Kumon, and the other boy frowned. Ranma had released Ryu from having to seal the _Yamasenken _(it was only fair, since he had used the _Umisenken_ back on the alien ship), but the bad blood of him forcing the other fighter to give up his strongest techniques was still present between them.

"Ranma!" "Ranma-honey!"

Ukyou and Shampoo pushed past each other and ran out to join the four males. Both were dressed and armed appropriately, but seemed to have checked their professionalism at the door. Not for the first time, Ranma thanked the gods that Akane wasn't around. The two girls ran towards him, but abruptly stopped, glared at each other, and composed themselves.

"Ranma-honey," Ukyou still used an endearment with his name, despite her change in demeanor. "Are you sure I shouldn't go and get my spatulas? You know I don't feel so great with this…" She held out her MSG-90.

Ranma sighed. "That's kinda the point, Ucchan…"

It was no secret that most high caliber martial artists had both contempt and hatred for guns in general. Even someone of Ranma's skill level, speed and durability, a gun was not to be sneezed at. The projectiles from a handgun, much less a rifle, were both very fast and very, very small. To really dodge a bullet was not impossible for someone of Ranma's speed, but he needed to know it was coming and from where. Someone with a sniper rifle on a roof could kill just about any martial artist if he was unwary, and a man with an AMR could easily punch a hole through even Ryouga's tough hide.

"Maybe you just need to practice more, spatula girl," Shampoo, despite speaking English better than she ever did Japanese (to the point where she never used Japanese anymore, the only one of the group to have given it up in personal company) still seemed to like annoying nicknames.

Ukyou bristled at the Chinese girl. "Like you're one to talk! I seem to recall you doing worse than any of us yesterday!"

"That was with a pistol! I've never shot one of those before! But I know how to use one of these," Shampoo said, and patted the scope on her rifle for emphasis. "Women of the Amazon Tribe aren't out of touch with the modern world, you know."

"No, just out of touch with reality," Ukyou shot back with a grin.

"That's it! You've mocked the Amazon Tribe for the last time, bento-for-brains!"

"Why don't you try saying that in Japanese, hon?"

Shampoo hissed angrily at that. "How about you put your money where your okonomiyaki-sized mouth is? If I can outshoot everyone else here, you give up your Tuesday meal with Ranma, and he goes out with me instead! If I can't, then I'll give up my date with him Thursday!"

"Hey, don't I have a say in this?" Ranma groaned. "And those aren't dates! Its just a friendly dinner, damnit!"

"I doubt she'd make a boast like that without being sure she could do it," Ryu commented quietly. Mousse just sighed. For someone who didn't know Shampoo at all, Ryu had drawn the obvious and right conclusion. Shampoo's father had been in the People's Liberation Army, and he had actually taught his daughter how to shoot, since he had been both a soldier and a martial artist.

"You're on!" Ukyou pumped her fist, too caught up to think perfectly straight. "If I'm second to a bimbo like you in anything, I don't deserve to go out with Ranma-honey!"

"It's not a date!" Ranma repeated. "NOT. A. DATE!"

The door to the base opened, and Kuno walked out, completely unashamed to be both late and last to show up. Like everyone else, he wore the personal armor, but in addition to the rifle and the Mechem NTW, he'd brought a sword sheathed in an ornate black lacquer scabbard.

"Tatewaki Kuno is here!" he announced, but no one seemed to pay attention to him with Ukyou and Shampoo at each other's throats. "Hello?"

"Good. We're leaving," Ryouga quickly announced, and put his helmet on. It was black, like the armor, and had a deep blue visor. The faceplate over the mouth, cheeks and jaw could be removed, but all four of the lost boy's squad were wearing the full body armor configuration, and that included the NBC protection of the air filtration apparatus. One after another, they slipped it on without complaint or comment (even Kuno!), and then flipped back the small antenna on the right side of the helmet so it poked out the back.

"Ryu," Ryouga said, clipping the helmet into place on his armor. "Take point. Kuno, watch our backs. Mousse, behind me."

"Taking it," Ryu replied, and started to lead them down towards a faint path away from the handful of small aluminum buildings. Ryouga followed directly behind, then Mousse, and finally Kuno, who seemed to be fiddling with getting his helmet on comfortably.

"Hold, I say!" Kuno yelled, catching up to his squad. "Surely, as a sword pierces with its point, the dangerous lead position should belong to our strongest member, which is, of course, myself!"

"May as well make sure they don't get lost," Ranma muttered, and turned back to his group. "Helmets on! Let's get going!"

* * *

Ranma walked in the direction of Ryouga's squad while he adjusted his helmet. It was actually an easy fit, and designed similar to the rest of the personal armor to that the inner padded layer conformed to the user. Once in place, he activated the electronics, and the visor in front of his eyes lit up. The suit itself had built in sensors, in addition to those in the combat helmet, but a lot of the information could only be displayed when looking through the Heads Up Display, or HUD. 

Ranma had worn the helmet twice before, and he had told Ukyou, Shampoo and Konatsu to spend some time getting familiar with it as well. Among the handiest features it had was a night vision mode, which used light amplification (as opposed to thermal imaging or infrared), and a proximity sensor. More esoteric sensor systems warned him if someone pinned him with a laser, or he was being hit by radar waves, or in the presence of different forms of radiation, or even if he was under psionic attack.

In any fight, knowledge of the enemy and the surroundings was critical to survival, much less victory. The School of Anything Goes Martial Arts was built on that fact, and XCOM embraced it as well. If need be, he could even toggle a real time feed from Ukyou's point of view, or Shampoo's, or Konatsu's, and that same feed would also inform him of what weapons they had and at what level of ammunition or effectiveness (if they were smartlinked). As squad leader he could even know at a glance if they were injured due to the sensors in their armor, and all eight of them were linked so they knew where the others were at all times.

Even aside from the integrated sensors and the information he had at his fingertips, Ranma was yet again impressed by the technology of UNETCO. The personal armor they wore was not only unrestrictive of movement, but it felt amazingly light. Sure, it weighed much more than his normal clothes, but the way it hugged the body, and the way it supported its weight, it was almost like a second skin. With the insulation and environmental features, it was even far more comfortable in bad weather than anything he'd ever trained in.

He couldn't wait to fight in it!

The second shooting range where they were headed was a small cluster of wooden buildings about eight miles from Seiran Mountain itself, through thick forest and rough rocky terrain. It was designed for endurance training: marching a significant distance and assaulting an enemy held structure. There was also a basic shooting range there, where they could practice at targets up to 400 meters away. While most of the Nerima Wrecking Crew had some form of martial arts projectile or ranged attack already, none of them had anything that could go out even 50 meters effectively.

Ranma could see the sense in learning to use something they'd long disregarded. Martial arts duels never really took place at extreme ranges; you generally met and fought your opponent face to face. In a war, this was not the case. The aliens he'd seen in films had preferred to strike from a distance, killing with incredible accuracy and ruthless precision. They weren't eager to get close to their targets, and they were more than capable of filling the air with death if anyone foolishly charged them.

To compete they also had to have the ability to fight at very long range. Only when they had that down could they be able to reliably advance closer to the point where their martial arts skills, and their vast superiority in hand to hand combat, could make a difference. Ranma knew that, when his squad was ready, they would be mostly used for the most dangerous sorts of mission: UFO assault. They would be the ones to fight in close quarters, but first they had to be able to get there in the face of enemy fire.

After the first mile or so, Ranma heard an unusual sound ahead of him. Kuno actually seemed to be humming a tune, and it occurred to the pigtailed boy that neither he nor Ryouga had called for a silent march. A couple seconds later, Konatsu seemed to realize that as well, as he asked Ukyou about if it would be ok to visit her sometime. The male kunoichi had practically been living with her before, but his new living arrangements had him a floor below where Ukyou was staying. For her part, the okonomiyaki chef was sympathetic to his obvious loneliness, but loathe to make it seem like she reciprocated his feelings in the way he wanted.

Ranma toned it out, and actually listened to Kuno, taking a minute to distract his mind and try and figure out just what song the kendoist was humming. It didn't sound like anything from any of the animes Ranma knew, and it didn't sound like anything from any movie he'd seen either. It was repetitive, and definitely some sort of marching tune. Maybe it was something military?

"Yo, Kuno!" He called to the older boy, determined to find out.

"Saotome…" Kuno returned, in a much less friendly tone of voice, looking quickly over his shoulder. "What is it?"

Ranma ignored Kuno's obvious displeasure. "What was that you were humming before?"

The swordsman scoffed, as if Ranma should have known it. He faced forward again, but at least answered the question. "The Bloodstained Messenger. _Chizome no Denrei_."

"Never heard of it," Ranma replied, light heartedly. "Must be old."

"Fourteenth year of the Showa," Kuno stated, but unsure, also said, "I think."

"You know the words for any of those old songs?"

Kuno kept walking for a few paces, before replying, "I do."

"Well?" Ranma asked, "Come on! Let's hear it!"

"You call that politely asking?" Kuno grumbled, indignantly, but having thought of a song, ended up singing it anyway.

"Koko wa okuni no nanbyakuri," The place was hundreds of ri from our country,  
"hanarete tôki Manshû no," in distant Manchuria,  
"akai yûhi ni terasarete," when, illuminated by the red evening sun,  
"tomo wa nozue no ishi no shita," my friend, beneath the rocks in a far-off field,  
"aa tatakai no saichû ni," oh, in the midst of battle,  
"tonari ni orishi kono tomo no," this friend who was next to me,  
"niwaka ni hatato taoreshi o." was suddenly struck down.  
"Ware wa omowazu kakeyorite." Without thinking, I ran to his side.  
"Gunritsu kibishiki naka naredo," Military discipline is tough, but,  
"kore ga misutete okaryô ka?" how could I just leave him lying there?  
"Shikkari seyo to dakiokoshi," Hang on, buddy, I said, holding him,  
"kari hôtai mo tama no naka…" wrapping him in bandages, with bullets flying 'round…

"You know, some of us ARE Chinese," Mousse interrupted, speaking just loud enough to be heard. "Show a little respect."

"That's right!" Shampoo chirped, actually agreeing with her fellow Amazon (for once).

"It was just a…" Ranma started to say, but Ukyou was already speaking up, louder and in opposition to her hated rival.

"Why don't you get off your high horse? The Chinese killed more of their own people than Japan ever did!"

"You think that's an excuse?" Shampoo actually turned around and broke formation. "China won't ever forget…!"

"Ok, you two…" Ranma tried to calm them down.

Kuno coughed. "You know, _Sen'yû_ ("My Comrade") was about the war with Russia."

"It was?" came from Mousse. "Still. It sounded like…"

"What it was about doesn't matter!" Shampoo all but yelled.

"You think China wouldn't do the same things to us that we did to them? You think China can be proud of itself and Japan can't?"

"Ranma," Ryouga was, for once, keeping his voice low key. "Reign them in. All this is being recorded, you know."

"Look, look!" Ranma spun around and stepped between Shampoo and Ukyou. "You two don't have to see eye to eye, but do you really have to tear into each other over this? I think a fight's a fight, and once its over; you don't have to go back to being enemies; sometimes a fight can make two people the best of friends. Hell, the Chinese Amazons try and marry the people who beat them in a fight, right? And Ukyou, do you really think because someone may hurt you if the situation was reversed that you're justified in hurting them?"

Both girls just stared at him for a few seconds, fishing out the contradictions in what Ranma had just said. Still, neither one was about to argue with him in front of the other, and his points did have some merit. After a few seconds, Ranma slowly returned to his point position for his squad.

"I…" Ukyou offered, first. "I didn't mean that what happened in the past wasn't, you know, pretty terrible. People killing people…"

"Shampoo have…" Shampoo quickly went back to English, silently cursing her brief return to flawed Japanese. "I've got plenty of reasons to not like you, but this shouldn't be one of them. None of us had anything to do with it."

"Good." "Good." They said, at the exact same time. "Fine!" "Fine!"

"About time," came Ryouga's voice from near the front of the line formation.

"They made up faster than you and I usually do, lost boy," Ranma replied, grinning behind his helmet's faceplate.

"It's amazing you guys haven't killed each other already…" Ryu made his single contribution to the conversation, and then they were off again. The hardest part of the march was ahead of them, but everyone in their group handled it without complaint. Even Kuno, who Ranma had pinned as the weakest of the group cross country, due to his relatively static kendo style, kept up when Ryouga got it in his head to have them do double time. And that was with the Kuno heir hauling a massive sixty-pound weapon on his back, plus its ammunition.

Ryu, unlike Ryouga, had no problems following directions, and they reached the second shooting range around noon. In the next hour of practice, Shampoo proved her boast had not been unwarranted. Unlike when they had practiced with handguns at the firing range in the base itself, here Shampoo quickly got the hang of her rifle, and used it to ever improving effect against targets downrange.

Ranma's ability with the MSG-90 wasn't bad, but he had a lot of room for improvement. Luckily, he had a knack for weapons in general, and combined with the psionically implanted information from before, he was improving more rapidly than he'd ever imagined. At a hundred yards, he was already hitting the target more often than not from a standing position, thanks to the 10x scope.

Then Ryouga's squad unpacked their anti-material rifles, and started taking their first experimental shots from a prone position. The 20mm rounds fired by the NTW came in high explosive, fragmentation or incendiary versions, and were twice as fast as the speed of sound. At the extreme end of the range, the shots that connected totally annihilated their reinforced steel targets, and one that missed punched off the upper part of a tree.

Ranma and his group gathered around to watch the spectacle, and after a few practice shots, Ryouga and his squad let the other four martial artists take a crack at the cannons. Then, as the sun arched past its zenith in the clear and cloudless sky, the group settled in for lunch… and the standard spectacle of both Shampoo and Ukyou trying to get Ranma to eat food they had brought for him, while fighting off the other. For most of the Nerima crowd, it was little more than background noise.

Out of all of them, only Ryu seemed really put off by it. "I can't believe how they fawn over him…"

Ryouga's squad ate by themselves, but still close enough to see and overhear what the other group was doing. All four had simply brought packaged food from the base commissary; it was designed to heat up right before opening, using a chemical reaction, in much the same way Ukyou and Shampoo had rapidly reheated the food they'd made for the trip.

"You'll learn to zone it out… eventually." Mousse took a bite out of a small sausage from his pre-packaged meal. It helped that he had his vision-correcting helmet off, and his thick glasses pocketed. Shampoo's tenaciousness was, he had always thought, one of her most endearing features. It was just so galling, even now, to watch her direct that attention to Ranma. Mousse felt like jumping in and trying to pummel the pigtailed boy, but he knew there was no point anymore, and it would only provoke Shampoo besides.

"I just wish he'd marry Akane and get it over with," the Chinese boy added, more than a little angrily.

Ryu seemed a bit thrown by that. "Wait, you mean he's still engaged to Akane?"

"Of course he is," Ryouga answered, taking a drink from his canteen.

"So why are those two after him if he's engaged?"

Mousse actually laughed at Ryu's question; as if it was the most naive and silly thing he'd heard in days. Kuno just glowered at the lost boy. "The engagement was forced on her! It is not legitimate!"

"Kuno," Ryouga said with a sigh. "You're only confusing things…"

Mousse finished his food, and faced Ryu (or who he thought was him). "Ok, let me explain. Ranma over there is engaged to Akane, because of their parents. A couple months ago, Akane was almost killed in China, and Ranma admitted he loved her. There was a wedding, but those two over there crashed it."

"We all kind of ruined it," Ryouga admitted, and then he gestured towards Kuno. "Some more than others."

"The foul knave was going to marry Akane!" Kuno argued, in his own way. "I can't imagine why you were just standing there and watching it happen!"

"Because they want to get married, that's why!" The lost boy shook his head. "I don't like it, not really, but…"

"Anyway," Mousse interrupted, "You know about Akane and Ranma, but he's also gotten engaged to Ukyou and Shampoo over there. For some reason, they all think he's god's gift to women or something."

"I do believe you're forgetting someone…" Kuno added, sagely. "My dear sister is also engaged to the vile womanizer."

"You mean she's obsessed with him," Mousse replied. "Not engaged."

Kuno wiped his mouth with a napkin. "Degrees of difference."

"So Ranma is… being pursued by three or four women?" Ryu asked, with a disgusted (or jealous) look.

"Those are the regulars. Aside from them, there's been a couple other men and women, right?" Mousse asked Ryouga, as he scratched his chin. "Nabiki kept a running tally. She'd know."

"I think it was four men and five other women, but they came and went," Ryouga said, nodding his head in introspection. "But that may or may not count Kuno."

"What are you fools talking about?" Kuno yelled, grabbing them both by the fronts of their personal armor. "How dare you say I chase after Ranma! I won't allow it!"

"You know about the _Jyusenkyou_ curse, right?" Ryouga asked Ryu, and the boy with the white bandanna nodded.

"The girl curse," he then said. "Yeah. You mean…?"

"Kuno here is in love with the pigtailed girl," Mousse confirmed, and Kuno's face lit up with joy.

"What about the pigtailed girl?" the Kuno heir asked, "Have you seen her?"

"So Ranma is the pigtailed girl?" Ryu even said it a second time, right in front of Kuno. "Right? Ranma is the pigtailed girl."

"Yep," Mousse replied.

"What are you talking about?" Kuno released Ryouga and Mousse, and went back to sitting where he had been before.

"It's impossible," Ryouga said, after Ryu started to look at Kuno like he had brain damage. "Some kind of mental block or something."

"Ranma Saotome, over there." Ryu pointed at Ranma, who was currently eating okonomiyaki and ramen at the same time, being unable to decide which one to taste first. "Turns into the 'pigtailed girl' because of his _Jyusenkyou _curse. And Kuno is in love with him. Or her. Is that right?"

"We love each other," Kuno corrected, and the three other martial artists hung their heads in defeat.

"It won't matter in a few days anyway," Mousse then said, a little ominously.

Ryouga chuckled at the in-joke. "That's right! Soon we'll be free!"

"Free?" Ryu asked, still lost in all the weird Nerima-stuff.

"Free of the duck!" Mousse started laughing manically.

Ryouga joined him in the mad laughter. "And free of the pig!"

"What the hell are you two talking about? Is everyone here insane except me and the transvestite?" Ryu looked over to where Konatsu was hanging out behind Ukyou eating sadly by himself. "At least he isn't engaged to Ranma or afraid of farm animals."

"I don't know what they're talking about either," Kuno replied, shaking his head. As if Kuno not getting something would make Ryu feel better.

After Ranma finished eating Ukyou and Shampoo's food, the girls ate quickly, and the two groups resumed their practice. Another part of the shooting range had a number of wooden enclosures, arranged to mimic the layout of a smaller single-level UFO. Here, the two squads took turns being defenders and assaulters. Their MSG-90s had the magazine and chambered round ejected, before the laser sight was turned on. Pulling the trigger with the laser sighting on a friendly would count as a kill.

Each team took two turns on both offense and defense, guarding the command room and entrance of the UFO and assaulting those places, before they expanded the field of practice. The assaulting team would start at the edge of the woods, and have to advance over an open field while the UFO defenders fired on them. The 'aliens' would then fall back into the ship when their attackers got too close.

The first few rounds were a real turkey shoot. Everyone had poor accuracy, really, but even Ukyou and Kuno were fast enough to at least come close to putting a bead on Ranma, Ryouga, Konatsu or Ryu, and by firing on semiautomatic, tag them. Then, the teams started getting creative, as certain parties began eagerly and boastfully keeping track of who'd they'd shot, and how often.

As the competition heated up, they started applying their martial arts techniques. The UFO defenders were often in basically static positions, the ones that gave them the most benefit of cover and field of fire, and this was both a strength and a vulnerability. Ranma used his speed once, and the _Umisenken_ another time, to get into a flanking position without being seen, or to snipe from a superior position. Ryouga created a smoke screen using the _Bakusai Tenketsu_, and another time used the same technique to mask their movement and create a deception by making it look like they were going in one direction instead of the other.

Ukyou, despite not having her gear, proved especially adept at being able to use her rifle as a close quarters weapon. Konatsu, after some initial difficulty, managed to adapt his multiple body technique to his heavier personal armor. The two teams went back and forth, setting up traps and feints, merging their martial arts with their new weapons and objectives, their sense of camaraderie and teamwork enhanced more under the pressure of a fight than it ever could be under normal circumstances.

So it went, for hours, and when they finally took a break from the team on team competition, Ranma and Ryouga brought them together to discuss what had worked and what hadn't. It was afternoon, and before heading back, they all took the time to practice their techniques, and enjoy a few one on one duels, though a few were more intense and serious minded than others. Ryouga fought Konatsu for the first time, Ryu sparred with Shampoo, and Mousse practiced with Ukyou.

By the time they got around to marching back to base, their spirits were high, and even the two girls seemed to be talking animatedly with each other about how much one was going to improve over the other. Even when Shampoo remarked how Ukyou had lost her date ("It is not a date!" Ranma yelled again) the other girl had just taken it as motivation to do better next time.

When they got back to the base, and split up to do individual work, it was almost as if they were all friends and comrades. Only Ryouga hung back outside the Armory, where they had all gone to return their gear and change into their clothes, for his guide dog to show up. Ranma decided to wait as well, and keep his 'best friend' company.

"Don't say anything," Ryouga warned, just as Ranma started to open his mouth.

"What could you mean?" The pigtailed boy asked innocently.

"You were going to crack a joke at my expense," the lost boy said with a frown. "I'm just saying: don't."

"Geez!" Ranma sighed and lowered his head. "You're no fun. No one's around to hear it, so why not?"

"Just…" Ryouga growled. "Just because."

As if on cue, Shirokuro rounded a corner, saw her master, and trotted over. Ranma bent down, and scratched the dog behind her left ear, causing her to tilt her head and sigh happily. Despite her master's gruffness, Shirokuro was a very friendly dog, and Ranma even (vaguely) remembered when she was little, back when he and Ryouga had gone to the same Junior High school.

"What ever happened to those puppies from before?" Ranma asked, just now remembering what had prompted the 'Yoiko Hibiki fiasco.'

Ryouga reached down to scratch Shirokuro's chin. "Two are grown up and fully trained, and I left them to watch over the house. One ran away, but Dad told me Hibiki dog's do that, and not to worry. I didn't know what to do with the others, since they were really too old to put up for adoption as puppies, so I volunteered them for K9 duty here at the base."

"You did?" Ranma stood up, still looking down at Shirokuro. "Well, I'll say this about your dogs: they're smart."

Ryouga smiled a little. "They are."

"Hey," Ranma said, but he leaned down to address the black and white dog. "Don't let your master get lost for a few more days. Not if he wants a taste of that drowned man water."

"No way I'll miss out on a cure after the last time!" Ryouga's voice was happy, and he even seemed to ignore the knock against his terrible sense of direction. "No Happosai around to drink it, and enough for all of us! You'll have to excuse me if I don't take the cure when you, Mousse, Shampoo, and your old man do. I'll have to show up a little… late."

"Joking about your own bad direction, lost boy?" Ranma slapped his friend on the back. "Don't worry. We'll forgive you. If everything goes as planned, we'll get cured and break in the new dojo on the same day!"

The fanged martial artist grinned at the prospects. "Should be fun."

"Well, your guide dog is here, so I'm off to finish that report," Ranma said, and started to walk away, but he paused to ask a quick question. "You get it done, yet?"

"Not yet." Ryouga didn't seem too worried about the assignment, however. "I'll see ya tomorrow, Ranma."

"I'll see ya tomorrow, Ryouga." Ranma headed down the hall, and despite the work ahead of him, he was happy. So far, being at the base had been like college, but better than he'd dared to imagine. He didn't have to worry about the more annoying classes like calculus or any of the sciences, and the stuff he did have to learn was made almost ridiculously easy. Better still, he was with people he considered his friends and peers, his family was together, he was just a few days from curing his hated _Jyusenkyou_ curse, and he was being paid a salary to improve his martial arts!

He almost didn't notice the siren that cut off his internal revelry.

"Hostile Incursion detected in local airspace! Hostile Incursion detected in local airspace!" A female voice blared over the base communications grid. "All combat teams assemble and report to duty stations! Repeat: All combat teams assemble and report to duty stations! Code Three is in Effect!"

-----


	15. Toy Soldiers III

Ranma had to watch, and wait.

He didn't have the rank or authorization to enter the Command Center when Code Three – UFO Interception and Transmission Decoding – was in effect. Instead, he'd headed back down to the Armory he'd just left, and together with Ryouga (who had gotten the same idea), they'd watched as four squads suited up. These were the sixteen men and women under the direct command of Captain Ben-Solomon, and despite being debriefed about the fight ahead, they strictly kept that information to themselves.

The Captain, Lieutenants Tsuchihashi and Lofquist, and Sergeants Hanley, Karpov, Feretti and Kinoshita, all emerged wearing regulation Power Armor. In the case of the Sergeants (except Karpov), this was the MA-3B ARES (Armored Response Environmental Suit), and for the other four officers it was the MA-3C MARS (Mobile Armored Response Suit). Both types of Powered Armor stood just over eight feet tall, three and a half feet wide at the shoulder, and weighed in at over 340 pounds, minus the pilot. Yet, they were fully articulated, could support a running speed of 20 mph, and offered anti-gravity assisted leaps (or in the case of the MARS, actual anti-gravity flight).

Most of the "squaddies" that the officers led (an amorphous rank above private, which didn't exist in XCOM, but below sergeant) wore personal armor, except for the two in Second Squad. Second and Fifth Squads were the two designated "Lightning Teams" of the base, and all the members wore MARS suits. This gave the entire fire team total battlefield mobility and allowed them to be used for rapid response and "firefighting."

Like most XCOM equipment, the powered armors continued the black colors and motif, with some unpolished gray patterning. The powered armors could also be called 'hard-suits,' since the outermost layer was composed of rigid and solid sheets of alien alloys. These hugged and mimicked the human form, though the forearm sections were more bulbous in proportion to a normal human arm, and likewise for the lower half of the legs and feet. The faces of the soldiers couldn't be seen past their tinted faceplates, but for quick, unaided, visual identification each suit had a number imprinted on the left leg, in white. Most also had some sort of obvious personalization, like a stylized skull, or a heart, or a star, somewhere on it.

They strapped on their weapons and armor, and Ranma could do nothing but watch as they went to fight. The base had already scrambled interceptors, including one of the base Firestorms – the man-made saucer type craft he'd seen when he'd first arrived – to down the alien ships, which meant that the deciphered alien mission profile was probably something they couldn't risk a clean landing with. Was it a Terror Ship, or worse: a Battleship heading towards a sleeping city somewhere? He didn't know; wouldn't know until it was over, and an official report was circulated.

So he waited with Ryouga, and felt helpless and in the dark. Eventually, the lost boy had left, and Ranma had returned to his room to wait for news. At some point, the base downgraded the alert to Code Two, which meant that the skies were clear, and it remained in that state for most of the night. Like Ryouga had the night before, Shampoo came over and brought food for the Saotome family in addition to that Nodoka had cooked.

They had eaten in comfortable silence, and Shampoo had been almost exceptionally well behaved – probably in an attempt to impress Ranma's mother. After the meal, the Amazon had stayed behind to help with the dishes, and Ranma had taken the opportunity to get back to his work. He reviewed parts of the Ahmadabad Massacre that he'd earmarked from before, and tried to start on the written paper, but his mind kept drifting towards what was going on outside.

All his life, he'd either run from danger, or confronted it. Much worse than either, was to have someone else fighting for you, risking their life for yours, and not knowing if they were succeeding or failing. It was frightening to have your life in the hands or others. He watched his the mailbox icon on his computer, waiting, wondering. Then, just as he had finished the second page of his report, hours after starting it, he saw a flashing mail icon indicating the reception of report possessing the 'high priority' tag.

Without hesitating, he clicked it and activated his mail client.

It took a few seconds to verify his identity, and then opened.

**AUTHORIZATION GRANTED - DECODING**

**NOTICE**: This data bundle and any attached materials that are not otherwise marked are classified as Angel/0A. If you are not Angel/0A clearance or above, report immediately to your supervisor or face disciplinary action.

-----Original Message-----

**From**: Lt. Cmdr. Yasuda  
**Sent**: Thursday, October 26, 2006, 22:39  
**To**: seiranmilpop0A/lists.unetco/org  
**Subject**: - REPORT - 10/26/06 Interception/Interdiction Debriefing

Relevant Personnel,

Between 18:15 and 18:20 local time, three unidentified flying objects violated Earth airspace under the jurisdiction of UNETCO East Asian Regional Command. Hyperwave decoding was complete by 18:26. Interceptions were conducted by three craft from Seiran Mountain, and one from Irkutsk. Three interdictions were then performed, recovering a Medium Scout, Large Scout, and Supply Ship. Squads one through four are to be commended for their work on the two downed scout ships. There were no reported fatalities. Attached is a more detailed report on the night's activities.

At 23:00 hours I will downgrade our alert status to Code One.

- Lt. Cmdr. Yasuda

"Nihil aliud scit necessitas quam vincere."  
Syrus

--

Noriko Yasuda  
Lieutenant Commander  
Far East Asia Branch  
United Nations Extraterrestrial Combat Organization  
Ext. 1716 - phone  
Ext. 7948 - fax

--

Ranma read the message over and over, amazed by how short and… mundane it was. There was a file attached, a document with information on the types of aliens encountered, the specific times and places the alien ships were engaged, the ordinance that was expended, and other dry accounting information. There were other parts, too, which were blacked out and censored, relating to conversations recorded during the event. Ranma knew the names of the two levels of clearance above his own: Archangel/1B and Malakim/2C. No doubt, the emails sent to them were totally uncensored.

Leaning back in his chair, Ranma tangled his fingers in his hair, and felt himself relax. No one had died; no one was in danger. Everyone had done their jobs: the people watching the radars across Asia, the people who intercepted and translated the alien transmissions, the engineers who got the interceptors ready, the pilots who flew the sorties, and the soldiers who assaulted the crashed flying saucers. Even, he supposed, the Information Control specialists who kept the rest of the world from knowing the truth about Earth's secret war.

That was what he was a part of now. It wasn't just about being the best martial artist he could be, it wasn't even about inheriting the dojo and the Anything Goes School. For who knew how long, he would be a part of those future reports; a member of the tiny unknown few who pushed back the darkness that encircled the world. It was the fight, the challenge, of a lifetime, and he went back to his report, invigorated at the thought.

* * *

So the days went by. 

There were more films, and more reports due, examining aspects of squad level tactics and different approaches to combat against different aliens. There was more time spent down at the practice range indoors and outdoors, sometimes by himself, but most of the time with Ukyou, Shampoo and Konatsu. He studied, he practiced, he worked, and in his free time, he sparred with his father or trained his martial arts skills by himself.

It was a busy sort of life, packed with things to do and responsibilities he normally would have chafed at, but Ranma found it more fulfilling and potentially rewarding than anything he'd ever done before. Once a day, he submitted his notes on the day's activities and observations to his mentor, and the burly American officer read it over before discussing what he thought Ranma should focus on next.

Captain Banks was an easy going man, much like Ranma himself, and while he certainly didn't hesitate to ask the younger man to add more and more to his workload, he wasn't like some of the teachers back at Furinkan – always grading him, deducing points, and insisting on work for its own sake. If anything the work Ranma did was curt and utilitarian, a fraction of what he had expected.

Every other day, for several hours, they attended lectures by officers on strategy, or base technicians and scientists on alien biology and physiology, or the proper maintenance of equipment in the field. Combined with the 'Reading Rainbow' psionic programming, it was more a review and refresher than a real class. In only a few days, he had met other personnel in the base, and even learned more about his mentor's personal life (married, wife and daughter in North Carolina), which hadn't been put in the dossier he'd first gotten.

He'd also caught up with the three Tendo girls, and even checked in on them during the day. Kasumi had been given the chance to work in the Base Medical Facility as a nurse-in-training, drawing on and building upon what she had begun to study at home and from Dr. Tofu's books. Nabiki, by her own design, had been set up as an intern for the Budget and Finances Division. Why she had wanted to become a paper pusher, he couldn't fathom, but she seemed happy to be an accountant-in-training and to finally have enough disposable income to not have to constantly swindle people (not that she would stop swindling people, only that she wouldn't have to).

Nabiki had even had the gall to ask him to let her take a few "farewell pictures" of the pigtailed girl, for "posterity." He shook his head at that, appalled by the suggestion at first, but at the same time in such high spirits (the _Jyusenkyou_ cures were in storage, and ready to be shipped to the base with the next flight), that he actually agreed, after a little prodding. No doubt Akane would've been disgusted, but he couldn't help but think he would… in a way… miss his girl curse.

Of course, actually transforming and walking around the base would raise too many questions, but a quick splash in his room, or Nabiki's, with the doors locked would be fine. He'd had some actually rather fond memories of being in his girl form, most of them revolving around using her looks to get free food. Soon, all that would be over. He wouldn't have to worry about Kuno glomping onto him and asking him out on a date, or boys leering at him, or Happosai trying to get him to wear girly underwear, or random guys trying to propose, or Pantyhose Taro calling him Femboy, at least he didn't have to worry about his mother finding out about his curse and making him commit ritual suicide anymore…

He also wouldn't get weaker when splashed with cold water, or constantly have to look for hot water, or even be drawn into otherwise avoidable fights because of his female gender. On the other hand… he'd had a lot of fun in those fights he'd only been able to have because he was a girl. They'd made him a better, more versatile martial artist! Reflecting back on it, he'd actually spent an inordinate amount of time fighting as a girl over the years.

"How much weaker would I be today, if not for this curse?" He had wondered, while Nabiki took the last pictures of the mysterious pigtailed girl… ever. Ever! At the same time, he wondered about Ryouga and Mousse's cursed forms. Their cursed bodies really did make them almost worthless in a fight, if they got splashed, but had it made them stronger at the same time? P-chan could certainly take a lot more abuse than any other pig Ranma could imagine, even one of those big wild boars from the Mountains, and hauling heavy loads around as a piglet couldn't have hurt the lost boy's endurance or strength training. Then there was Mousse. Had being forced to adapt his Hidden Weapons style to his cursed form improved his skill in the Art?

Had the curses, the damned curses, actually made them better martial artists?

No, it couldn't be! Ranma thought of his lazy father, and how he fought so often in his panda form, and so well! He thought about Pantyhose Taro, who definitely became stronger because of his weird minotaur-like cursed form. The one outstanding exception, besides Herb (who Ranma really didn't know well enough to compare), was Shampoo. For her, turning into a cat was nothing but a disadvantage. It was weak, and he hated cats and feared her cursed form. No, he ultimately decided, the curses of _Jyusenkyou_ could make you stronger, but only in the same way you could blind yourself to improve your hearing.

It was time for them to open their eyes.

"Something wrong, Ranma?" Nabiki asked, peeking out from behind her digital camera. "You're not smiling."

"Just… thinking…" Ranma-chan forced a smile on her face, and arched her back on Nabiki's bed. The mercenary Tendo girl had wanted borderline-hentai pictures to sell at a premium, but Ranma had only agreed to do something tasteful. He intended to keep one or two of the pictures for himself, after all, as a memento. So pants and a buttoned shirt, left just open enough to be sexy, or one of Nabiki's tube tops, were the order of the day.

"Tame!" Nabiki had complained, but only once.

"You know," he (or rather: she) mused, while Nabiki took another picture. "Without this curse, I'd have had a hard time beating Ryouga back when he learned the _Shishi Hokoudan_. I may not have even figured out Herb's _Ryu-sei Hishou_ in time, because I wouldn't have understood how _ki_ gets weaker in a girl's body…"

"Having second thoughts?" the Tendo sister asked, with an amused smile. "You could always just hold onto the water. Save it for a… rainy day?"

"Ha. Ha." Ranma-chan remarked, and after a few more pictures, disappeared into the bathroom. A few minutes later, Ranma emerged dry and dressed. Nabiki was already half done taking down the sheets they'd put up against the walls and bed, to make sure no one figured out where the pictures had been taken.

"Hey, Nabiki," Ranma asked, reaching up to help her. "How much have ya gotten out of Kuno over the years, selling pictures of me?"

"A lot," she replied, leaving it at that. "After this, I'll only have pictures of Akane. It'll be like the old days, before you came to the dojo. Its true I won't have any competition from Gosunkugi, but I won't be able to sell anything to Kodachi, either…"

"It ain't like you need to sell pictures of Akane and me to afford stuff anymore!" Ranma folded up one of the white blankets, and tossed it onto Nabiki's bed.

"Oh, I know," Nabiki assured him, still wearing that amused smile from before. "But how can I leave a niche market unexploited? And besides, it's fun!"

Ranma just stared at her incredulously.

"Anyway, Ranma…" Nabiki folded the last of the makeshift drapes, and put it neatly down on her bed next to the one he had thrown. "It seems almost all our friends … or your friends anyway, have ended up here."

"Yeah…?" Ranma half asked, half agreed, not sure where she was going.

"Ranma," she said again, with her back to him so he couldn't see her face. "Ryouga's girlfriend. The pig farmer. She's dead, isn't she?"

The pigtailed boy didn't respond, unsure what to say, and Nabiki nodded.

"I thought so," she continued, taking his silence for a yes. "I've suspected that for a few days. It… explains some things."

"You knew her?" Ranma asked.

"Only a little…" Nabiki placed her hands flat on the bed, and Ranma silently wished she'd turn around. With her back to him, he couldn't see her face, while her tone of voice was as guarded as usual. "We met when she visited the house. She seemed… nice. Sweet. Girly. Even a little normal. I always thought it was… funny… that the lost boy would hook up with someone like that. It's like you being engaged to Kasumi, I guess."

"Akari was… she was a friend, too." Ranma inwardly cringed at how he wasn't good at expressing his feelings, even for a poor deceased girl. Akari had been a great person, forgiving and kind and friendly. She had been a friend herself, and she had made Ranma's best friend happy. He just… couldn't really verbalize all that. So he headed for the door and a quick exit.

"They told us Dr. Tofu was alive," Nabiki quickly said from behind him, but he didn't turn around. "Is that true?"

"I don't know." Ranma then added, about to open the door, "I think it's classified. Sorry."

Nabiki, as usual, wasn't so easily deterred. "I don't suppose you'd tell me for…"

"I'm pretty sure trying to bribe me to release classified information is a violation carrying much more than a fine," Ranma cut her off. "Besides. I take my promises pretty seriously. You know that."

"Kasumi and Akane are a little worried," Nabiki explained.

Ranma gritted his teeth. "If you, or Akane, or Kasumi, need to know… submit an inquiry. Say you're engaged to him or something. That's all I can say for now."

He opened the door, and stepped out. "I've got a meeting. I'll see you at the party, Nabiki."

And the door closed behind him.

Nabiki carefully cradled her digital camera in her palms.

"Goodbye, Ranma-chan," she whispered.

* * *

Ranma and Ryouga sat, one seat between them, watching the screen in front of them, and the film that played on it, frame by frame. This wasn't the normal study session they attended; it had just been announced early in the morning, and both boys quickly realized why they had been asked to attend with so little notice. They weren't here to learn from others, but to provide insight. 

"Could you play it again?" Ryouga asked, cupping his chin with his right hand. "Starting from 33:22?"

"Thirty six minutes, twenty two seconds." The technician working the digital recording did as asked, and the film jumped back to that instant, a little more than a half hour into the second UFO assault mission, 26 of October 2006. In the row behind them, Lieutenant Commander Noriko Yasuda and both base Captains were also seated, watching, and listening.

On screen, again frame by frame, came the image recorded by Squaddie First Class, Gordon Perez. The UFO that had been shot down had been a Large Scout, but it was mostly intact, including the valuable Elerium-115 reactor. E-115 was a rare element, a unique isotope that (so far) only the aliens could create. All the most advanced XCOM technology relied on Elerium 115 to power it, and thus any opportunity to acquire the stuff was quickly seized upon.

Aside from a gaping hole cut into the side of the UFO by an XCOM plasma cannon, it was largely in one piece post-crash. A two-point assault had been launched, once the perimeter around the UFO had been secured, with two soldiers storming the UFO 'door' and two going in through the hole in the hull. It was executed perfectly, and also seen as giving the squaddies more experience against a shell shocked and weakened foe.

As Squaddie Perez pulled back his hand, causing one of the doors to the UFO command and navigation room to open, Ranma saw the object of this emergency meeting. It was a Floater – replete with sagging, hairless purple flesh, sloped, vaguely Neanderthal-like face, and mangled posture. Floaters were the thugs of the alien invasion, with no real offensive psionic abilities, they were used as light soldiers, scouts, and terror agents. Compared to Snakemen or Mutons, the alien medium and heavy infantry respectively, they were relatively weak. Their only saving graces were their cybernetic enhancements, which made them substantially hardier and able to survive on Earth for weeks, in addition to giving them a means of anti-gravity propulsion. They were also quite strong and tough compared to normal humans, but most soldiers considered them cannon fodder in comparison to most of their alien peers.

Perez lined up his shot quickly, and with perfect accuracy, seeing the Floater in the darkness thanks to his night vision sights. Not wanting to damage the machinery behind the alien, he fired once, aiming for the body junction below the rib cage. A hit there with a laser rifle would cut into the most vulnerable section of the Floater's cybernetics, ruining it and effectively cutting the creature in half.

Except, the Floater dodged the shot.

Not to say that it dodged the laser, which was impossible, but it had obviously read the point of aim for the weapon by how it was handled. At this Perez quickly depressed the trigger for semi automatic fire. Still, the alien was a step ahead. It dodged the first shot, moved its arm back and away to avoid the second, and ducked low enough for the third to pass over its shoulder, hitting the alien navigational computer behind him and causing a small explosion.

Then, shifting from defense to offense, the alien lunged, grabbed the front of the laser rifle, and pulled forward and to the side. The laser discharged again, scorching a wall, and then Perez could be heard hissing in pain a millisecond before the alien twisted the gun, and broke both his wrist and his rifle with a sound like dried wood splitting. The Floater then cocked back its right arm, but instead of a fist, it tucked in its thumb, flattening its hand into a spade, or a knife.

Before it could strike, however, its head exploded in a shower of purple and pink gore, and superheated steam. The body still stood, or rather floated a few inches off the ground, for a few seconds before falling forward. Behind it, in the darkness, an officer in powered armor lowered his own laser rifle. The recording paused there, and Ranma and Ryouga looked over their shoulders at their commanding officers.

"Did any of that look familiar to you?" Noriko asked.

"The disarming technique used was the 'Seedling Splitting Technique,'" Ranma replied, somberly, and in English. "It uses inverse kinematics to manipulate a body through the extremities. As for what it was doing at the end… I'd guess a strike at the nerve clusters at the base of the neck."

"That's what it looked like to me, too," Ryouga observed, scratching his chin with his thumb and index finger. "Commander Yasuda, I'd like to ask about the laser rifle. The T-7A2 ALR is mostly plastic, except for the metal bore. And that was what broke, right?"

"Are you sure…?" Ranma started to ask.

"You'd be correct in that conclusion, Mr. Hibiki," the Commander said, her brows kneaded together in consternation.

"Then there is no denying it. As one who knows the technique, who has mastered it, it is as plain as day to see." Ryouga's eyes narrowed, as he imagined the implications of what he was about to say. "The aliens have unlocked the secrets of the _Bakusai Tenketsu_…"

* * *

One last note here: I'm sure some of you were surprised, and perhaps a bit annoyed, that I didn't go right into NWC vs Aliens fightin' but really, the kids aren't ready yet, and this was designed mostly to build character motivations, and further the backstory plot. Don't worry, tho: the real fighting will begin very soon, right after the "cures" are passed around, and the new dojo is broken in. 


	16. Panacea I

**Note**: Because of the scene structures to this chapter (which is the same general size of all the others, 30 pages) the chapterette divisions are rather pronounced. This means that the first and third parts are signifigantly smaller than the second. As a consequence, I will - when it they are totally ready - post the last two parts at the same time, for your reading convenience. Thank you.  
I will also take this opportunity to state that the **next** chapter will finally take everyone back into the action we all know and love, after the cure and relationship stuff is down and developed a bit.

-----

The year is 2005. For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. The Nerima Wrecking Crew and their families have been relocated to Seiran Mountain, XCOM headquarters for the Far East. Between their training, the cursed members of the group are finally on the verge of curing their curses, so why do they hesitate?

-----

**The Road To Cydonia**  
_**Chapter VI**  
Panacea_

-----

The black helicopter landed to the sound of applause and cheering.

Regulations forbid the use of pyrotechnics or even thrown party favors, but it didn't keep Soun and Genma from dancing happily at the sight of the vehicle as it entered the hangar, and it didn't discourage Ranma, Mousse, Ryouga and Shampoo from giggling and chuckling in eager anticipation as the pilot brought his craft down for a perfect landing. There was a tremor among the Jyusenkyou cursed, as they fought off the almost instinctive urge to rush the helicopter to search for their valuable cargo. Still, they held back, and waited, hands wringing and eyes wide.

Too slowly, the helicopter blades slowed to a stop, and the orange vested work crew came forward to unload the crates onboard. The five cursed martial artists all but crawled over each other, just outside the yellow and black boundary markings painted on the floor, each one trying to get the first glance at the elusive cure. The fate of the last barrel of _Nanniichuan_, or drowned man water, back during the failed wedding was still fresh in all their minds.

At that time, the guide had sent the water to the Tendo Dojo in thanks for Ranma and Akane defeating Prince Saffron. Soun had gotten a hold of it before his would be son-in-law, and subsequently tried to keep it a secret until the marriage was underway. There had only been enough for one person (a sad oversight on the Jyusenkyou Guide's part), and when Genma found out, he'd tried to take the water for himself. Ryouga had busted in, purely by accident, and seen the water, and then Mousse had joined in just before Ranma arrived, hearing the commotion. In the ensuing melee, Happosai had ended up drinking the entire barrel of water, thinking it was sake.

"Not this time!" They had all vowed.

"I see it!" Ranma all but yelped, pointing at a large plastic cylinder with a number of warning labels applied liberally as stickers, including "Biohazardous Substances," "Environmental Hazard," and "Class 9: Dangerous Substance." Then, written in English on a blank white sticker: "H2O: Spring of Drowned Male."

"Another one!" Ryouga whooped, and pointed, as another plastic barrel was unloaded with the same labels, followed by a third, and a fourth. Only then, finally, did a barrel with the label "H2O: Spring of Drowned Female" appear. The work crew treated the barrels with due safety, and then finished with the rest of the helicopter's cargo.

The Nerima crew, meanwhile, were huddled near where the barrels had been set down. Normally, Jyusenkyou water was held in a wooden cask, but at some point, either the casks themselves or the water inside had been transferred to secure storage as Hazardous Materials. Each plastic drum had a hermetic seal on the top, along with a dangling tag describing transportation routines and warnings associated with the contents therein. Then, one of the work crew loaded the barrels onto a trolley, secured them in place, and casually rolled it past the excited martial artists.

"It's actually here…" Mousse said, smiling almost ear to ear. "It's actually here!"

"Where's he taking it?" Genma asked, watching the trolley with hungry eyes.

"Down to Quartermaster Arugula," Ranma explained, as he started to walk. "Once he inspects it, all we have to do is sign for it, and it's ours!"

"Congratulations, son! And you, too, Saotome!" Soun slapped them both on the back, heartily, but then he leaned down and whispered something to the elder martial artist. Most everyone was so fixated on finally getting the cure to their curse that they didn't even notice the two wicked grins on the faces of the older men. Shampoo, however, did notice.

And she guessed the intent behind their smiles as well.

Soun veered off to take care of his own business, but everyone else made a point of crowding into the elevator with the surprised trolley driver. It descended far too slowly for the tastes of the cursed Nerimites, while a slow calming music track played in the background, driving their nerves further and further on edge. The worker in the orange vest just looked from side to side, nervously noting how everyone seemed to be staring at the cargo in his trolley.

"Ummm…" He said, softly. "Have you people been waiting for this stuff?"

"For two years," Ranma answered first. "Six months, and five days." He then gestured towards his father. "Thanks to this idiot taking me to a cursed training ground without knowing what the curse was!"

Genma's glasses glinted in the light. "Don't be such a whiny girl, Ranma! It isn't like you went out of your way to learn Chinese either. Besides… as I recall, you cursed me first."

"I didn't know the pools were cursed like that! And what did you do; old man? You knocked ME into a pool," Ranma grabbed his father by his white gi. "Even though you knew it had just turned you into a damn panda!"

"What?" The trolley driver asked. "A panda?"

"A true martial artist is never caught off guard, no matter the circumstances! Like so!" Genma suddenly whirled, tossing Ranma to the side and into Mousse. The elevator was large, but there was hardly enough room to fight in, and the Chinese Amazon barely saved the back of his head from hitting the metal wall behind him.

"Watch where you're throwing your children, will you please?" Mousse said from his position beneath Ranma.

"That's it, old man!" the pigtailed boy jumped back to his feet, and a furious bout of close range blows and counters erupted between father and son.

"No fight on elevator!" Shampoo momentarily lapsed into her flawed Japanese. "No is safe!"

"Typical Ranma; never thinking about where you're fighting. Haven't you learned anything since you knocked me off that cliff and into my own personal h…" Just then, Ranma's elbow slammed into the lost boy's face, cutting short his tirade.

"Sorry, man," Ranma parried two snake fist strikes from his father. "Didn't see you there!"

Ryouga just chuckled, and the leapt at them, a fist cocked back. "I'll kill you BOTH!"

"You idiots! Think about where we are!" Mousse quickly undid the buttons for his shirt around his wrists. Flicking forward his hands, two long chains shot out, trying to encircle the warring trio. A second later, Shampoo joined the fray, trying to 'help her airen.' It was pure luck that, before things could get worse, the elevator reached its destination, and the trolley driver hastily exited with his cargo.

The poor guy all but ran from the brawling martial artists. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the door closing, the five people behind it still fighting, when suddenly a hand interposed itself between the elevator doors. The driver yelped, and picked up his pace as the doors opened again, and the Nerimites started to stream out.

"Stop!" One of them bellowed.

"Hey! Waaaiiit Up!"

"You people are CRAZY!" The driver yelled back, "Stay the hell away from meeee!"

"We're not crazy!" Another of them answered, as they picked up their pursuit. "We just want the water!"

"Jyusenkyou water!"

"We…!" Thud! "Damnit Mousse, what the hell are these chains made of?"

"Titanium! The workshop on Level Four has some incredible stuff!"

By the time the five martial artists finally managed to untangle Mousse's new "Super Chains" and drag themselves to the Quartermaster, the trolley driver was long gone. He had not left before leaving a few complaints, however, and Master Sergeant Arugula looked less than pleased when he saw the aptly named Nerima Wrecking Crew.

"You clowns have a fun time jacking each other off?" He asked, his long ugly face scrunching up in distaste. Arugula was a former special forced soldier, injured twice in combat to the point where it seriously impaired his combat effectiveness. A plasma blast had incinerated part of his helmet, maiming his face (but saving his life). That same mission, he'd had his left arm blown off, and had opted for a prosthetic replacement. Despite being retired from active duty, he wore his uniform crisply and with the utmost pride.

"Sir, no sir!" All of those involved, minus Genma, snapped to attention and saluted.

"It was just a misunderstanding," Ranma elaborated. Or started to, before shutting up and leaving it in the air as to just what was misunderstood about the five of them getting into a fight in an elevator with a trolley full of cursed water.

"Shut your hole, kid! And look sharp, you shit faced pukes! Fix. Your. Uniforms. NOW!" Arugula barked, and Mousse retracted the last dangling titanium chain back into his right sleeve. Quickly, the master of hidden weapons buttoned it up, and all three young fighters straightened out their uniforms. Genma, on the other hand, just hung back and waited.

Finally back in respectable condition, they waited tensely for the Quartermaster to nod in approval. When he did, he turned and picked up an electronic notepad. Without talking, he began to write on it, letting the new arrivals stew where they stood, still at attention. Behind Arugula and his tiny office, they could see row after row of storage: crates, equipment, parts, sheets of metal and even refrigerated goods. The Armory was a level above here, and also under Arugula's jurisdiction, but that was strictly for military hardware.

"'Ey, now," he looked up from the e-pad at the four martial artists. "You jokers are here for the water that just came in. Fine. Fine. I'll get you out of my hair ASAP. Let's see… Shampoo; H2O: Drowned Female."

Arugula slowly walked over to where the water drums rested nearby, still on the trolley from before. He checked the tags, before finding the right one. Shampoo, emboldened by having her name called, was already there, waiting for permission. The Quartermaster made sure she knew which one to take, and then directed her to sign her name to an electronic file on the e-pad.

"Hibiki, Ryouga; H2O: Drowned Male," Arugula then called out; the lost boy walked up and signed his name before picking up a water barrel. According to the tag, each one contained 85.6 liters of Jyusenkyou water. Also included were directions for properly breaking the hermetic seal, for testing the pH, a notification that the water had been inspected for biological contaminants, and that trace levels of contaminants had been detected and not filtered before delivery.

"Mousse; H2O: Drowned Male," Arugula called them out, in alphabetical order, one by one in an orderly procession. "Saotome, Genma; H2O: Drowned Male…. Saotome, Ranma; H2O: Drowned Male."

"Good. Good. That's seems to be that." The quartermaster checked off the five drums of cursed water, and added his own signature to the appropriate forms. "Now clear out! This ain't no tea house, ya know!"

"Sir, yes sir!" The four youths chorused, and saluted with their free hands. Each with a cure in hand, they all but skipped back to the elevator, the fighting from before completely forgotten. As Genma joined them in an elevator, heading back up to the housing section of the base, he noticed Ranma's more somber look.

"What's wrong, boy?" Genma asked his son, leaning in closer. "You seem… more pensive than usual."

Ranma just shook his head. "It's nothing, pop."

"I don't think I can wait till the party…" Mousse interrupted, cradling his Jyusenkyou water drum with his right arm. "I'm going to use it in my room. I know I said, I'd wait, but…"

"I believe I, too, will cure myself as soon as possible," Genma seconded the Chinese boy's decision. "There have been too many close calls over the years."

Shampoo pushed past Mousse, to stand close to Ranma.

"Don't worry; I'll wait for the party!" She batted her eyes at him. "It'll be so romantic, curing ourselves at the same time! Why don't you let me pour the man water on you, while you pour the girl water on me, hmm?"

"Wouldn't that create some sort of horrible she-male water around your feet?" Mousse asked, deadpan. The other two teenagers shuddered at the thought.

"Hey, have any of you thought about what we're going to say… if anyone asks about our cursed forms?" Ryouga asked, his serious tone catching the attention of the others. He had his cursed water under his right arm, and his left hand on one of the barrel handles.

"That's not really a problem for me," Mousse replied, and gave Shampoo and Ranma a lazy look. "Or Shampoo."

"Why would anyone care what happens to girl type Ranma?" Shampoo asked lightheartedly, but Ranma and Genma had also taken on austere expressions.

"If I got cured," Ryouga continued, speaking slowly as if unsure how to share what he was thinking. "I'd always planned to get Akane another piglet to take P-chan's place. I don't think that's an option here."

"Well, you were always wandering off before. So it's no different this time." Ranma pursed his lips and nodded as he thought more about what he'd said. "We'll just tell Akane that P-chan is lost, or on his own out there, and not to worry. It isn't like she needs the little porker; especially with how suspiciously absent he's been this past year. You aren't going to tell her, are ya?"

"About P-chan?" Ryouga frowned and looked down at the water that was his cure. "No. No, I don't think so. It would just cause more grief for everyone."

"Good," Ranma said with obvious relief. "I can't say a part'a me doesn't want you to get what ya deserve for being such a pain in the ass… but right now it really isn't worth all the trouble."

"It **is** your fault I got this damn curse," Ryouga grumbled.

Ranma held up his hand, his own frown deepening. "Let's not go back down this road… I say you shouldn't have followed me to China, you say I should've watched where I was going, I say you were late to the duel, you say I knew you'd get lost and show up late… let's just skip it this time."

"Fine." Ryouga shrugged. "What about 'Ranko Tendo,' then?"

"Ranko?" Shampoo asked, not familiar with the name. Mousse wasn't familiar with it either, but he didn't feel the need to make that much clear. Before Ranma or Genma could reply, the elevator hit their floor, and the doors opened. After a few seconds, Ranma reached over and held out his hand to keep the doors from closing.

"I pretended to be Akane's cousin a while back to keep my mom from finding out about my curse," Ranma explained, quickly. "The only one who'll miss her is Kuno."

"Well: what about Kuno?" Mousse asked, after a moment. "Sooner or later, he'll realize his pigtailed girl is gone, and you know who he'll blame for that."

Ranma huffed at the suggestion. "He can't even remember his precious pigtailed girl's name. You guys just don't talk about her around him, and Kuno'll forget about her long before he realizes she no longer exists. Ok?"

They all looked to each other, and silently agreed: no more talking about their cursed selves, no more drawing attention to the past. The elevator doors opened again, and this time they filed out. In a few hours, they'd finally put an end to two years of suffering.

In a few hours, they'd be free!

* * *

Genma adjusted his glasses, reading and re-reading the warning and use labels attached to his barrel. It wasn't really his style to be so thorough, even in researching martial arts techniques (much to Ranma's misfortune), but this was his cure, here! If he somehow messed up using it, he'd have to try and… appropriate his son's and try again. 

He doubted that would go over well.

"Husband?" A knock on the bathroom door heralded the concern of his wife. "Are you well? You've been in there for some time…"

"I'm fine!" He called back, and opened the door for her. Nodoka stuck her head in, and saw him fully dressed, and looking like his normal self.

"Have you used the water yet?" she asked, but he held out his hand, keeping her well away from the bathtub, and the unlocked but still sealed water drum that sat there.

"I was just about to," Genma explained, handing her the tag that had been attached to the barrel, along with a small piece of paper, the end of which was wet and slightly blue.

"According to the litmus test, the water is safe to use… It will dilute in only three times its volume of regular water, so I'll have to douse myself rather than simply make it into a bath." Genma stepped into the bathtub, reached down, and opened the hermetic seal on the top with a hiss. "Stay back, and make sure none of it touches you."

Nodoka nodded quickly, closing the door slightly as a shield.

With a deep breath, Genma Saotome lifted the water drum over his head, and began to pour. As the crystal clear waters enshrouded him, his body blurred and shifted. Nodoka felt an electric tingle in the air that sent goose bumps down her back and along her arms. Finally, Genma dropped the empty water drum; it hit the floor and rolled under the sink.

"It… it worked," Genma said softly, and then exclaimed loudly, looking down at his wet human hands. "It worked! I'm cured, Nodoka! Cured!"

"Husband!" Nodoka opened the door, but again held back. He was, after all, covered in cursed Jyusenkyou water. Still, he seemed perfectly fine. If anything, the water seemed have rejuvenated him in her eyes. He was a full man once more, not quite the physical specimen she had fallen in love with, but to her eyes still a dignified and even attractive man. Seemingly oblivious to his wife's thoughts or interest, Genma just stood in the bath tub as the cursed water pooled around his feet, staring at his hands.

"Husband?" Nodoka asked, a little worried by the intensity of his glare, directed as it was to his human digits.

"Nodoka…" Genma turned slowly to face her, his expression somber, even stunned. "Something's wrong."

* * *

Mousse closed his eyes as the water flowed down his body. It felt cool and refreshing, and despite the temperature, he knew he was human – felt that he was human! It was almost orgasmic: he was cold, he was wet, and he was HUMAN! There was a mild tingle, no doubt from his old curse being purged, and then it was gone and he was whole. So wonderfully whole! 

Mousse shook his head back and forth, his long black hair fanning out behind him to whip over his shoulders and over his eyes. Dropping the now empty plastic barrel, he reached up to his face and ran his hands from his temples to the back of his head, pushing his hair into place. Remembering the instructions from before, he turned on the shower, and let yet more wonderfully cold clear water cleanse his body and soul.

Only after he was sure that the Jyusenkyou water had been washed away, and gone down the drain, did he turn off the shower. Stepping out of the tub, he reached for a nearby towel, and began to dry himself off. Struck by the sudden impulse to see himself, he reached for his glasses, and headed to the mirror over the sink.

Sure enough, it was him.

He was cured!

Running the white towel over his face, and then the back of his neck and his long hair, he reflected on how long it had been since that horrible day he'd … stumbled into the cursed pool in that cursed place called Jyusenkyou. Of all of them, he had managed the stupidest and most pathetic story surrounding his cursing. His subsequent turning into a duck had only one benefit as far as he was concerned, and that was the times he'd just taken to the sky and flown.

He would miss that, he realized, and closed his eyes. He would miss being able to spread his wings, seize a lazy updraft, and with powerful chest muscles, propel himself higher and higher. Mousse tried to remember those good times, and bit-by-bit, his expression changed from ecstatic joy, to a perplexed frown. He tried to think about after he had been first cursed. How he had…

Had…

What had he done?

"I… I can't remember," Mousse whispered, staring at himself in the mirror. "I can't remember...!"


	17. Panacea II

Akane was a martial artist, too.

Or so she told herself, and others, whenever the subject came up. In truth, she had really reached the limits of her interest in the Art. She had met a wall, which was her lack of specialization in _ki_ – she had virtually all the other fundamentals down besides it, from weapons to forms to advanced techniques to even a limited degree of aura control and danger sense. Even before Ranma had showed up she had known that she had hit a sort of plateau, but with her level of the Art seemingly more than sufficient to handle anything life threw at her, she'd been content with it.

That, she had come to see, was what made her different from Ranma and his peers. For them, the Art was an integral part of their lives, and the way they fought mattered as much to them as their names, their families, or their very lives. Shampoo was a Chinese Amazon, supposedly the best of her generation, and she had trained under Cologne herself. For Ukyou, her martial arts were her cooking, and in their indivisibility, she was fanatically devoted to both, unable to give them up even when she thought they stood between her and her Ran-chan.

The boys of the Nerima Wrecking Crew were even worse than the girls. Kuno and Mousse had honed their respective specialties through grueling training, the former because of his samurai lineage obsession, and the latter in a desperate bid to impress and win over Shampoo. Ranma and Ryouga, however, put even them to shame. Both seemed willing to do anything for their martial arts, and both had endured training Akane would never have considered putting herself through. She could still remember Ranma's agonized cries from when he had trained to defeat Picolet Chardin. Her comparatively weak willed approach to the Art was probably why she had never developed a particularly potent _ki_, or at least she suspected that was the case.

Still, for all that, she felt that she could understand the mentality of the martial artist, and reflect the more noble aspects of it in herself. She was a martial artist, but she was also a human being, and a woman, and a student; the Art wasn't her life, it was only a part of what she wanted to be and what she believed in. Ranma, she secretly hoped, would also be a part of her life, as he had been for the last two hectic years.

Which was why she was here.

Ranma's door loomed ahead of her, and for the second time, she had second thoughts about making her presence in front of it known. It wasn't that she missed him, given that he took pains to drop by the Dojo almost every day, and that she was always there with her father overseeing the construction. It wasn't that she was afraid of him being with Ukyou and Shampoo so much, though when she thought about it, it did annoy her. Both girls still had ambitions for the pigtailed boy, and Akane just knew that they took every opportunity to try and manhandle him, and as spineless as Ranma sometimes was, he probably let them.

She resisted the urge to pound on his door, but bit back her furor and gave Ranma the benefit of the doubt. After all, it wasn't as if she had seen him acting that way, at least not recently. She was here because she had heard about what had happened to Mr. Saotome and Mousse; because she had heard that Ranma had heard, and because she knew how he was feeling, and about the decision he had to make. She just dearly hoped that if she rang the doorbell that she wouldn't open it to see Shampoo or Ukyou present and trying to "comfort" him.

She rested her ear against the cool metal, but couldn't hear anything from inside. It wasn't a surprise that individual rooms were soundproofed, given western standards of privacy, but it only helped to make the surroundings more unfamiliar and intimidating. Everything was uniform on the outside, and the same shades of metallic gray, medical white, or cool blue. It lacked a certain character that came from years of use and personalization, and even minor imperfection. It even reminded her, vaguely, of that horrible alien ship they'd been trapped on.

Finally, she swallowed her anxiety and nervousness, and pressed her index finger to a small panel that served as both doorbell and security lock. It scanned her finger, checked her clearance level from the file of her on the base, recorded where she was and when, and then made her presence known to the room's occupant. She waited, closed her eyes, and tried to imagine how she would get Ranma to talk about what she imagined he really needed to get off his chest.

Should he take the cure?

Even if it cost him all the memories he'd had from when he was a girl? Akane understood that it wasn't an easy decision to make. Being around him for so long, and so often, she knew how often Ranma had ended up in his female body thanks to a careless splash of cold water, being caught in the rain, or simply not paying attention to his surroundings. Unlike Mousse, Ranma's cursed form was human, and so he usually hadn't been in a huge rush to change back. What would getting cured cost him, really?

All those fights, even most of his speed training with Cologne, had been when he was in girl form. In addition to cumulative months of time forgotten, what if he forgot all those fights, all that training, all that experience? Could he afford to? Mousse hadn't really lost all that much, she suspected, and Genma – despite how readily he had taken to being in a panda's body – seemed to be coping well. Ranma had to be wondering, thinking, about the same dilemma, and she was sure he'd want someone to talk to about it.

The door retracted into the wall with barely a sound.

"Akane," Ranma said, sounding a little surprised that it was actually her. He stepped aside, and motioned for her to step inside.

She hadn't actually been to his room before, and it was different than she imagined. Back at the Tendo Dojo in Nerima, Ranma and his father had been given the guest bedroom to sleep in, and made rather a mess of it in little time. Most of the subsequent décor must have been Genma's work, since Ranma (finally given a room of his own) kept things Spartan and relatively tidy.

Like almost all the housing in the base, Ranma's room had a simple design: the main door led to a living area about twelve feet by twelve feet square. From there, another door lead to the adjacent apartment's living room, another to the shared bathroom, and another to a bedroom. They'd all been given some basic furniture to use, and Ranma hadn't tried anything elaborate. He had a desk in the living room with a light, his computer, and other work related objects. There was also a small, low table, and a few matte black _zabuton_ cushions piled on top of each other.

"Uhm… you want somethin' to drink?" Ranma quickly put out one of the black cushions, and headed towards a small refrigerator. She was a little thrown by the good host behavior, but she supposed she'd never really went to see him at a place he considered his own and no one else's, where the rules of etiquette were different. For all that, she found herself liking his sense of propriety, if only as a change of pace.

"I've got some soda, water…" He rummaged a bit in the fridge. "Um… grapefruit juice?"

Akane knew she wanted to relax the atmosphere, and that she could be around for a while, so she took up his offer. "A soda would be great, thanks."

He took out two classic cokes and handed one over to his guest. Rather than sit at the table, however, he pulled out the chair for his desk and sat in it. Resting his drink and his arms on the armrests, he leaned back, and opened his soda can with a hiss. He struck her as laid back, even casual in his normal Chinese style silk shirt and pants, and in total contrast to how Akane had imagined him to be, wracked over what to do about his curse and cure.

He easily guessed the reason behind her visit. "So: you heard, eh?"

"I… yeah." Akane swallowed an attempt to persuade him it was something else. They were alone here and there was no way he would buy into such an obvious lie. So she didn't bother, but did blush at how transparent she must have seemed.

"You just missed Ucchan," Ranma said, and took a sip from his drink. "And Shampoo. I'm half out of coke now."

"I suppose you don't want to talk to me about it then, since you've already met with Ukyou and Shampoo!" Akane clenched her fists, closed her eyes tight, and got ready to stand up. She mentally rehearsed how she would thank him for the drink and excuse herself in the same breath.

"I didn't talk to them about anything. It ain't their business," Ranma added, and shook his head as if sensing how what he had said hadn't been enough. "I'm a man, Akane. I can make my own choices about what I do with my body."

Akane started to get up. "I don't even know why I came!"

"Why did you come?" Ranma asked, responding almost on instinct, and silently kicking himself for being so instantly defensive.

"I just told you I don't know!" Akane snapped back. "After all, a man like you wouldn't want to talk to a tomboy like me about anything!"

"Look, it ain't like that!" Ranma sighed. "I just… I already made up my mind. I made it up when Mousse and pops told me what happened to 'em. I just don't wanna talk about it, that's all. Why can't we talk about somethin' else? Like the Dojo? Or… or…"

"Or how to use _amaguriken_ speed attacks from a low center of gravity?" Akane guessed, looking at him with a confused and hurt expression. "Or how to vary the width and density of a _ki_ attack? Or whether you can invert a _hiryu shoten ha_?"

Ranma blinked, surprised and speechless.

"I've overheard you and Ryouga, and even Mousse, talking about martial arts, but there's more than that to life. We can try and talk about those things; we can try and talk about the dojo, but…" Akane sat back down, and balled her hands into fists on her lap, fighting the urge to run out the door or find something to hit him with for being so hard to approach. "But don't you want to talk about something else? About this?"

'About us?' she left unsaid.

"Guys don't talk about that kinda junk," Ranma replied, and cut off anything else he was going to say by taking a long drink.

"Ryouga would," Akane said back. "Is he any less of a guy?"

Ranma rolled his eyes. "That's not really a good example…"

"Akari used to tell me about how Ryouga would bring her flowers, how he would write poems, about how he would talk about how he felt with her. Mousse wouldn't hesitate to explain to Shampoo why he… loves her."

"Those guys are… they're different," Ranma interrupted, though his face showed that he didn't entirely believe himself. "Ya can't compare me to them like that."

"You're not going to take the cure, are you?" Akane asked, and Ranma sucked in a breath between clenched teeth.

"No," he replied, after a handful of pregnant seconds. "No. I'm not."

"I guess I… just wanted to hear it for myself," Akane admitted, energy draining out of her.

"You gonna try and talk me out of it now?" Ranma asked, his voice resigned to a long argument (or a short and violent one).

"I never wanted to argue… I didn't come here to try and persuade you one way or the other," Akane explained, with a measured tone of voice. "What did I even say to give you that impression?"

"Why else would you be here?" he asked, slowly, warily. "Shampoo and Ukyou, and mom and pop…"

"Ranma." Akane stressed his name. "I'll admit, I… I prefer you as a guy. I want you to be a guy, all the time. I don't want to take a walk with you, and have to see you be jittery and alert for sprinkler systems or gathering clouds. But I'll accept whatever you choose to do, and I'll stand by your decision. I came here to offer you a sympathetic ear."

"Don't you think I want to be a guy all the time, too, Akane?" Ranma replied, his voice quiet. "I know you don't like it when I… like hold you and stuff, after some idiot splashes me with water in a fight or somethin. I want to be a guy: a full time, always-a-guy, guy. No matter the weather. But…"

He grimaced, and took another seemingly long drink from his soda. Akane, sensing she was close, finally opened her own drink, and gave him some time to compose himself. He was not, by nature, someone to talk about his feelings, or even his motivations, but she could tell that he was in the verge of saying more. She took a drink, too, and waited, but Ranma never spoke up, preferring to stare at the red tin can in his hands.

"But… what? Ranma?" Akane prodded, gently.

"Nothin," Ranma said, and then amended himself. "I mean: I obviously have my reasons, it's just… Damnit! I don't want to lose my memories as a girl. I don't want to lose my memories of so much of the last two years. They're… they're precious to me, Akane. Without them, I don't know who I'd be."

"What do you mean?" Akane asked, even though she had a pretty damn good idea what he did mean already.

"The more I thought about it, ya know…? The more I tried to remember good times from a year ago, fun times, the more I realize I was a girl at the time. A lot of 'em were fights, like that first one with Kodachi, or at the ice rink with the Golden Pair, or hell: even fighting Ryouga in the rain. Do you remember that night? And then you clocked him with a brick or dumbbell or something."

He laughed a little at that. "Even Happosai and all the fighting I did with him, and with Cologne. I know it made me stronger. I need those memories. I need 'em!"

When he paused, Akane nodded her head in understanding. "Ranma…"

"And I…I…" Ranma continued a few seconds after hearing his name, stuttering a bit. He was still staring down at his drink, down at his hands. "I don't know how I'll feel without those memories. I don't know how I'll think or feel about stuff. We… you and me… I think a lot of what made me… feel about you could go away, too."

"I don't want that," he concluded. "It's what I fought for, and I don't want to lose it. Gods! I… I hate this curse, Akane… I hate it… but I don't think I can live without it."

Akane wasn't sure what to say to that, coming out so suddenly, so she quietly stood and walked over to him. Putting her drink on the low table, she stood next to him and gingerly placed her right hand on his left one. Slowly, as if unsure, his hand pivoted until their fingers and then palms touched. He held her hand in silence, and both teens began to blush, unfamiliar with the intimacy, despite the engagement, despite the professions of love a few months ago, despite even seeing each other naked before. None of that diminished the intensity of emotion that came from simply holding hands.

"You are a man, Ranma," she assured him, and he turned his head to look up at her. "The curse will never change that."

"Except when I'm a fifty year old married man, turning into a sixteen year old girl," Ranma said with a frown.

She smiled and shook her head in tiny increments. "Even then."

Akane froze, as he rose up from his seat, still holding her hand. She realized, just a moment before it happened, just what he had in mind. A part of her jumped at the thought that Ranma was finally, finally, trying to take a step forward in their relationship. Another part of her was scared, and had no idea how to respond, tending to default to pushing him away or worse. Their first real voluntary kiss missed by a few millimeters, and as he pulled back, embarrassed, she moved her head to correct his miscalculation.

It was awkward and strange at first, and neither knew what to do with their hands, accomplished martial artists that they were. The fingers that had been touching gradually interlaced, and Akane felt a bit of a shock as his other hand, still holding a cold can of soda, rushed past her waist. She giggled at the sensation, and that he hadn't dropped it or anything, and he made a huffing sound before putting it on the desk.

Breaking apart, they looked at each other again for a few seconds, eyes wide and cheeks flushed. As the moment of passion slowly slipped away, the normal nervousness began to creep into its place. Despite both of them being objects of affection for so many for so long, they were almost stunted in dealing with it sans violence or anxiety.

"Akane," Ranma asked breathily. "Can I… I mean I'd… ah…"

She could guess what he meant to say, and answered by trying to take the offensive. They didn't miss the second time, and the electric light-headed feeling returned in force. A shiver ran down her back as they pressed more closely together and she became aware of how little was between them. The base was always a uniform and fairly comfortable temperature, so she had dressed lightly in a plain shirt and skirt. Then, Ranma's wayward right hand finally found a place to put itself to some use, as it rested on her hip.

She thought about moving it, especially given that it was still quite cold, but it seemed to be behaving itself and slowly warming up in its current locale. Instead, she made the split second decision to reach up with her free hand and tangle it in his hair. Not only was it something she had seen on TV and read in mangas before, but Ranma had thick, rich black hair as a boy, and she liked the feel of it.

For an instant, she felt the urge to look around and make sure no one was spying on them, but then she remembered fully where they were. This wasn't the Tendo Dojo, with prying and over-eager family members, or dangerous and desperate rivals. No one could hear them much less see them. Her blush and embarrassment deepened as she thought about the potential consequences of that fact.

As if on cue, she felt Ranma's hand wander up her side.

"Ranma…" she said, trying to sound stern, but instead sounding throaty. "Wait a second, Ranma."

He seemed to shake himself from a daze, as he held her but also put some room between them. His expression went from slightly cross, to concerned, to afraid, all in the span of a second. She smiled, and made sure he didn't jump to the wrong conclusions.

"Let's just… think about where we're going, ok?" she asked. "Before we get lost in the moment or anything."

He seemed perplexed, but smiled back and nodded in agreement. "So, um… what do we… what are we going to do?"

Akane looked long and hard at him, and slowly made that decision for herself. Despite the arguments and the fighting, she did love him – or she thought she did. She had been willing to die for him during the fight at Phoenix Mountain, and he for her. Frighteningly, she remembered that embarrassing moment on the alien ship, when she had leaned over him and seen a little too much about his state of mind.

'Ranma Saotome,' she repeated to herself, half heartedly still fighting nervous fear and insecurity, 'is the man I want to marry. He is my fiancé.' And finally, she was glad for all that seemingly disgusting rumor and hearsay her friends and older sister had seen fit to expose her to. Taking a deep, deep breath, Akane finally made a decision, and (to her shock) the more she thought about it, the more attractive it became.

Retrieving her can of soda, she led him to his sparse bedroom.

* * *

Discerning motivations, especially in women, were not one of Ryouga Hibiki's specialties. It was often only in retrospect that he realized how he had been used, tricked, or otherwise manipulated by those he had vested small measures of trust in. Over the years, and quite naturally, this had invested him with a deep-rooted sort of jadedness and suspicion towards seemingly innocuous gestures he couldn't quite grasp the reasoning behind.

In that vein, Ryouga wasn't sure why Kasumi had opted to join him outside, rather than go on with whatever she had been doing. His own apartment was only a hundred feet or so from Ranma's, down the same hallway, and when he'd seen the elder Tendo sister near the pigtailed boy's door, he hadn't given it a second thought. Well, maybe a second thought, but definitely not a third. It came to his total surprise then, when Kasumi had veered off and asked where he was going.

He'd curtly explained that, despite the fact that Shirokuro was house trained, he still walked her once a day outside the base. Kasumi, like most everyone, had been smitten with the black and white dog, and she had reminded the lost boy that one of their neighbors also had a dog named Bess, and that she would feed it when they went away. He hadn't known that, though he did know of the dog itself, and that it was a _Shiba Inu_ breed (and thus smaller than Shirokuro, who was mostly a German Shepard-_Akita_ mix).

He'd expected the conversation to end there, and for her to go her separate way, when she had asked if she could join him. If any of the other girls, except Akane of course, had asked that, he would have immediately wondered what they wanted from him, and asked them to get right to the point instead of playing around. But this was Kasumi, and she had not once given him any reason to feel suspicious; which didn't mean he felt any less perplexed by her offer.

Kasumi, like her sisters, had been given an apartment on the floor above his and Ranma's. While he waited for her to put on a proper jacket and outside attire, he reached down and scratched Shirokuro behind her ears. She was a very independent dog, and still getting used to the new routine of living in Seiran Mountain instead of the Hibiki Home. He felt a little bad about that, and about taking her from the house she was supposed to guard (and lead wayward Hibiki family members towards), but he took some consolation from the fact that two of her puppies, now full grown, were keeping vigil there.

Besides: he needed Shirokuro here.

He couldn't afford to get lost, or slip up, or disappear for a few days or even a week. Not if he was going to get his revenge; his and Akari's. His parents, if they found out, would probably lament how he had made their lives a little harder, but they would understand. … And if they didn't, then he was resolved not to care what they thought. He would do whatever he had to, and that was all there was to it. Shirokuro tilted back her head and looked up at him with something like concern.

"Don't worry about me, girl," he said, and tapped her cold black nose playfully. "Let's both of us just do our jobs…"

"Sorry for the wait," Kasumi interrupted, emerging from her room wearing long pants and a light blue jacket. "I wasn't sure how cold it was outside…"

"It shouldn't be too bad," he replied, not too concerned. The elevation and cold hadn't been a problem for him when he went out before, but he was considerably hardier than almost anyone he knew. Kasumi seemed to be well equipped, and he saw the tips of gloves in her jacket pockets, as an added precaution.

"Let's go, Shirokuro," he said, and patted the dog's side gently. She looked back from her master to Kasumi, and started to lead them towards the exit. It was, as Ranma had joked, really her taking him for a walk, not the other way around. Even the leash was more for his benefit than his dogs.

How sad was that?

"I'm sorry you couldn't have dinner with us the other day, Ryouga-kun," Kasumi spoke up, after they'd walked in silence long enough to convince her he wasn't going to start a conversation by himself.

"I'm the one who's sorry," he quickly said, and then added more softly. "I had a lot of work that night."

Kasumi smiled warmly in understanding, but this only seemed to make the lost boy feel worse. "I do hope you'll drop by more often when the Dojo is ready."

"I suppose I'll have to, since Commander Yasuda wants me and Ranma to try and share our techniques." He didn't sound entirely happy about that, and she wondered why. She wasn't clueless when it came to the lifestyle of a martial artist, surrounded as she was by them. She'd even had some training, before her mother had passed away. Out of her sisters, she was the only one her father had taught his second tier _ki_ techniques to – it was just a pity they conflicted with her temperament so sharply.

"Have you thought about just writing them down as scrolls?" Kasumi asked, as they waited for one of the base elevators. Next to her, Ryouga pursed his lips, and considered what she had suggested.

"I hadn't thought of that," he admitted. "It's a real good idea, actually. We should all record our techniques, in case…" he paused, and reconsidered his words. "In case we don't have the chance to teach it personally."

"Did Mr. Tendo ever write down his techniques?" Ryouga then asked, as the elevator arrived and they entered it. "I know the Saotome School has quite a few techniques that the Tendo School doesn't."

Kasumi hadn't really wanted to get into a talk about martial arts, but she didn't let that fact show as she answered his question. "Father brought his scrolls with him when we left the house. I was only ever allowed to read two of them when I learned the _Tendo Ryu:_ _Jigoku Waza_. The others remain sealed."

"_Jigoku Waza_?" Ryouga took a guess at which technique that was. "Is that the demon head aura technique I've seen him use?"

Kasumi nodded, a little embarrassed that it was so obvious.

"You can do that?" he asked, unsuccessfully hiding the skepticism in his voice. The elevator reached the floor with the mountain exit, and Shirokuro led them out. Ryouga was already reaching into his back pocket for his ID card. Kasumi's possibly wouldn't let her outside by herself, but his would, and the cameras and pressure pad in the floor would record their exit and entrance.

"We all learned some basic aura projection," Kasumi replied, looking briefly in the direction of the camera built into a nearby corner.

"I've never seen any of you use it, even Akane," Ryouga replied, as they then boarded a tramcar to take them to the lower base exit. Once there, they would pass through another final automated checkpoint.

"Well, none of us have very powerful fighting spirits to begin with, so learning the technique doesn't mean we can use it effectively. More to the point, it relies on one's… disposition at the time. For father, it is easy to summon the necessary state of mind, but for Nabiki or Akane or myself, it is only possible in moments of distress and frustration."

"Frustration?" Ryouga asked. He was familiar with the flavors of emotive _ki_, and how they could be used to form attacks. Neither he nor Ranma had ever fully developed an aura projection using confidence or depression, their respective areas of specialization. Ranma could extend his aura, and make the people around him feel lighter on their feet (not that that was very useful), and he could do the same with his heavy _ki_, producing an opposite effect. The problem was that, except when he used the perfect version of his _shishi hokoudan_, the depressive aura generally wasn't strong enough to make a difference.

"Yes," Kasumi said, with a wan smile. "Father was quite saddened when he realized I didn't have the temperament to master the higher level techniques of our School. Nabiki wasn't interested in more training after she turned thirteen, and Akane was more comfortable with the physical aspects of the Art."

"That's why you have scrolls with your techniques, I guess." Ryouga seemed much more relaxed, talking about martial arts, and he even began to smile a bit. "I'll bring it up with Ranma and my group the next time we meet."

"Oh, how are Mousse and Kuno?" she then asked, as the tram sped them along. "Are you all getting along well?"

He looked at her in a manner that suggested he wasn't sure whether to talk to her about that or not, but eventually he came to the conclusion that it couldn't possibly hurt. "There was actually a lot of trouble at first. Ryu owes me for getting him back use of the _Yamasenken_, plus he's the kind of guy who respects strength, so there was no problem there. But… Mousse complains a lot in private, mostly about Kuno, but I let him do as he wants for the most part, and that's an arrangement that's worked so far."

He sighed. "Kuno, though… It isn't that he dislikes Mousse or me; he just thinks he's better than us. He chafes at orders, and second-guesses what I tell him to do. I literally had to threaten him to get him to go to the range and practice every day, and I just know when we actually see some fighting, he'll go right back to charging at the enemy with his sword. The idiot'll get killed before he even… "

"Anyway," Ryouga concluded, before he said too much. "It isn't so bad now. We just need more practice together."

The tram gradually slowed to a stop at the last checkpoint, and the two stepped out, led by Shirokuro. It was pretty much a straight concourse to the exit, but the dog knew better than to let that stop her from leading a Hibiki around. Like a guide dog, she knew to lead without being told to.

"What about you, Kasumi-san?" Ryouga asked, tacking on the honorific as always. He had never really felt familiar with the Tendo girls, despite visiting the house and Dojo so often, and talking with each of them at least a few times. In Akane's case, he knew she wanted to be respected by her peers (and Ranma's), and so he had been careful to always treat her that way. Really, the only girl he'd ever addressed normally, or with a –chan suffix, had been Akari.

"Me?" Kasumi asked back, not catching his meaning.

"I mean, your internship," he explained, and used his ID card again to get them to the exit door. It unlocked, and slid into the reinforced wall, allowing them to finally go outside. Without an environmental type suit, like the PASGT personal armor, they were immediately met by a cold wind that made them wince and narrow their eyes. Beyond the doorway lay the aluminum buildings – just shacks really – of the faux weather station. Ryouga also knew that, retracted and hidden under the ground, were three strategically positioned automated turrets nearby.

Kasumi made a polite humming sound, which immediately gave away her mixed feelings about the subject he'd broached. "I'm… learning a lot."

Shirokuro started to sniff around, and feeling the full bite of the mountain cold (even in summer), Kasumi took out her leather gloves and slipped them on. When she didn't immediately continue, Ryouga licked his lips, and in a rare gesture of genuine curiosity, prompted her to continue.

"I think we've all learned a lot over the last week," he said, but looked down at his dog rather than at Kasumi. "Not all of it stuff we wanted to know. But… I assume you meant that in a good way?"

"Well…" Kasumi took a deep breath. "Yes. I always did want to go to college, to get a degree in something, and this is like that. But… I suppose I'd always been more interested in holistic medicine. Here, everything is so dry and scientific; I think a lot of it is over my head. The learning machine helps a lot to remember information, but not to understand it. I feel… I guess I feel a little intimidated by the other nurses and doctors, and how smart they all are."

"They don't treat you badly, do they?" Ryouga asked; a hard and protective look to his eyes.

"No, no, not badly. Just…" Kasumi searched for the right words. "Like an outsider I guess."

Ryouga slowly nodded, as Shirokuro led them away from the clearing and down a rough path in the forest. "I know how that feels… Like you're a ghost in a crowd."

"At home…" Kasumi's voice broke a little; she missed it so badly. "It was almost like being the center of the world. There was a lot of work, but I didn't mind. I was just happy to always be around my family, and around people who cared about me. But… but my problems must seem so inconsequential compared to the important work that everyone has to do here! I feel silly for even bringing it up!"

"It isn't inconsequential, Kasumi," he assured her, and this time did look her right in the eyes to make sure his point got across. "It isn't! We're fighting for our homes and for the things we love. I thought I had a reason to fight, to die, to kill, once… but it wasn't anything like what I know now."

Kasumi blinked and looked at him with doleful brown eyes. "You look so sad when you say that."

Ryouga just snorted dismissively, and went back to looking at his dog and where they were going. "Don't you know, Kasumi-san? Depression is the foundation of my power."

They wandered down the path, dappled light filtering down from above.

"Thanks for sharing that with me, though," he added. "I don't know if there's anything I can do to help…"

"You listened," Kasumi said, keeping pace next to him. "I feel better just having been able to tell someone about it. That's what friends are for, right, Ryouga-kun?'

He looked at her briefly, as if to argue the point, but smiled just a little and nodded. They walked for a time in silence, but it was a comfortable mutual sort of silence. Shirokuro didn't deviate much off the barely worn path, and eventually she led the two humans to the top of an outcropping of rock, jutting out from the very foundations of the mountain.

The view that they had from that place was very much like that they'd experienced flying to Seiran on the black helicopters, except this time it was still light outside, and the full majesty of the Hida Mountain range, known as the Northern Alps, opened up un-obscured before them. In the distance, just breaking the horizon, part of Mount Hotaka-dake could be seen – at 3,190 meters high it was the second tallest peak in Japan, second only to Fuji-san itself. Blocking almost all of it, other mountains crested like waves of dark brown-almost black, checkered by thick green forests.

They rested there, before beginning the walk back.


	18. Panacea III

"Water?" Ryouga asked, holding out a small flask canteen. Kasumi nodded gratefully, and took a long draft from it. Another cold breeze flew in, but neither seemed to mind. Even Shirokuro took moment to find a nice spot, walking in a circle a few times before lying down.

"You must train in these sorts of places often," Kasumi remarked, handing him back his flask. Ryouga took a smaller drink from it, and screwed the cap back on.

"Not so much by choice, but yeah." He was a little surprised by how his tone didn't reflect how bitter he normally felt about being lost all the time. It had to be because, for once, he had company… and he wasn't worried about getting lost, not with Shirokuro around to guide him. Out in the woods: this was really as close to a home for him as that house where he read notes from his parents on the fridge, dated weeks or months ago, and where he kept souvenirs from across Japan and much of East Asia.

"The Mountains give you room to think. You can go days without an interruption, weeks without seeing a human face. Not only was it a good place to develop _Sakkijutsu_, or danger sense, but to practice all sorts of techniques without distractions. And… and," he lowered his voice as he spoke. "Out here… where there was no one to ask directions from, I could forget that I had no where to go."

"You were always welcome at the Tendo Dojo…" Kasumi offered.

Ryouga made a sound half laugh, half scoff. "Not really." Seeing the concern and even hurt on Kasumi's face, he held up his hand and gestured for her not to take his comment too seriously.

"What I meant," he began, but rethought what he was on the verge of explaining. "Is that, while I was always treated with kindness when I visited, I felt… guilty. Like I didn't deserve it. I've tried to be careful with the house, but I know I've done a lot of damage to the yard, and the dojo, and the wall. Not to mention trying to kill your brother-in-law."

Kasumi blanched at that.

"Do you really mean that?" she asked. "Did you actually want to kill Ranma?"

"I wonder about that myself." Ryouga answered evasively at first. He saw that she wasn't quite satisfied with that, and guessed that it must've been a serious question for her. She wanted a real answer. He couldn't imagine why, but he decided to humor her with the truth. She had never had the privilege of meeting up with real killers, like the warriors of the Musk Dynasty, but he was close enough.

"I was so angry with him when I finally found him in Nerima," Ryouga explained, and looked up at the light blue sky; the same color as Kasumi's jacket he realized. "If he'd been slower, maybe… I think I probably would have killed him."

He looked over at her. "… Disgusting, huh? I don't even know why I'm telling you this."

'Maybe because nice people shouldn't give me the time of day,' he thought, and there was that well of bitterness he'd been missing. 'Maybe I feel the need to make sure they realize that.'

"You seem to get along with him now," Kasumi observed instead, and he couldn't tell how she felt about what he had just admitted to.

"Ranma and I deserve each other. I still don't like him, even if he is…" Ryouga shook his head, and laughed at what he had almost said. "He's just my rival now, Kasumi. Someone I want to beat. Someone I want to surpass."

"I think you two remind me of father and Mr. Saotome," she replied, and smiled enigmatically. "I even saw you and Ranma playing shogi once."

"That damn Ranma cheated, too," the lost boy grumbled angrily.

Kasumi giggled, and the sound of it lightened his mood.

"Do you…" he relaxed a bit, and decided that the chance to get a little praise was worth parting with some secrets. Living an isolated life, and being a generally shy person, he tended to hoard every impressed look and word of encouragement he could get his hands on. Normally, if he'd dropped by the Dojo and Akane or Ranma weren't around, he'd offer to help Kasumi with housework, not just out of propriety, but also out of a need to feel useful and worthwhile.

"Do you want to see something neat I've been working on?" he asked; his voice hopeful.

"Sure!" Kasumi encouraged, and gave him her full attention. He secretly suspected that she wasn't interested in martial arts stuff, but it being all he knew, he still thought that he could impress her with a more practical application of what he'd been practicing. It reminded him of when he'd hoped to impress Akane by teaching her Martial Arts Gymnastics, except with Kasumi; it was platonic… almost like showing off what he'd learned to a sister or close cousin. He'd never really talked much to her before, but she'd always had a calming presence, not like with Akane or even Akari, where there had been that added dimension of stutter-switch intimacy.

"You probably know about the _Bakusai Tenketsu_. That's where you use the breaking point of an inanimate object to destroy it. About the only things you can't use it on are plastics and things like leather. Almost since I learned it from Cologne, I've tried to find more effective uses of it in a fight." He drew three little lines in the dirt with his finger, all-radiating from one point. "Like tunneling the blasting point, so it explodes closer to the enemy. Unfortunately, I hit a bit of a plateau, so after the fight with Saffron I decided to take a crack at the next level of Construction based martial arts."

"I didn't even know there was a construction based martial art," Kasumi commented, seemingly interested.

He grinned a little wider and nodded. "It isn't a real combat school, like Anything Goes. I guess it's more like what I heard about martial arts eating."

"You heard about that?"

"It cost me an arm and a leg…" he brushed that off to avoid getting side tracked on how Nabiki could weasel large sums of money out of someone for small bits of information. "But construction martial arts doesn't have a lot of fighting in it. Even my _ki_ attack, the _Shishi Hokoudan_, is designed to clear rubble. After meeting up with the engineer who taught me the _Shishi Hokoudan_ a second time, he gave me a scroll to practice the most advanced technique in martial arts construction, the _Seirensho Tenketsu_. I didn't think I'd ever get a real job, or have a dojo or my own like Ranma, so I figured this was my best hope."

"This technique, the 'Smelting Point,' is used to vibrate materials to high temperature and separate them. It isn't really commercially efficient anymore, but even a small amount of precious metal can be pawned off for good money. On the other hand, I don't need oxidizing agents and junk like that. Here," he said, and stood up, taking a few steps away from her. "This'll be the first time I ever showed this to anyone. I'd planned to master it… and show it to Akari as a surprise for her birthday. Let her know I could support her and stuff when we got married."

Shirokuro raised her head, ears perked up, but Ryouga held out his hand and she didn't get up. The lost boy kept walking, and suddenly stopped, his hands splayed out at his sides. Kasumi felt a rush of energy in the air, as he built up his _ki_ aura. Even as dull as her senses were when it came to such things, she could perceive the difference between his _ki_ and hers, even if she were hit by the mood to be able to use her own aura.

She was a candle.

He was a volcano.

The air grew thick and heavy, and she could feel the power of his spirit pulse against her skin, even though her clothes, sending shivers up and down her body. Then, like a normal person snaps his fingers, Ryouga lit up like a blast furnace, cloaked in black, green and sheets of ethereal energy. He clapped his hands together in front of him, and the aura receded completely, back beneath his skin where it bubbled and churned, desperate for release.

He clapped his hands again, but the sound was different, not like flesh on flesh, but more like the meeting of steel on steel. He raised his hands above him, and slammed them suddenly and without warning into the ground. She couldn't see anything happening, but on the verge of her human senses, she could feel it in the earth beneath her. Abruptly, a vent opened up in the ground, hissing loudly, followed by another and then a third.

A sulfur smell reached her nose, and the ground began to crack. Veins of red-hot molten material seeped up and crept along the ground, headed towards where Ryouga kneeled, hands on the earth. The red glow seemed to be everywhere, and Kasumi felt a rush of heat blow past her, and then it was gone. The red, angry looking veins in the ground cooled and sealed up, leaving shallow rivulets behind. Ryouga stood up, breathing heavily, and after a few seconds of looking down at something near his feet, he pivoted and motioned her over.

"Don't worry. It's perfectly safe," he assured her.

Kasumi steeled herself, and walked over, careful not to step on anything that had once glowed such a hot and burning red. Ryouga stepped aside, and held out his hand towards a small round pool in the ground. This alone still faintly glowed from heat, and here the sulfur smell was even stronger. Still, she couldn't quite see what he was gesturing towards.

"Smells bad, doesn't it?" he asked, amused. "The technique separates the metal ores from the elements they bond with in nature, usually sulfur or oxygen. You think this is bad? Perfecting the _Seirensho Tenketsu_ involves blowing up tens of square meters of rock to get the volume right, then learning to selectively detonate most of the rock, but not the parts you want, then learning to detonate the small parts you want, and not the rest. After that, you have to use a variant of the _Bakusai Tenketsu_ to melt the material, and then do what you did before, and sort it. A few months of practice all but killed my sense of smell."

He took out his flask of water, and poured a little on the rapidly cooling pool, causing it to bubble and turn to steam. Kneeling and reaching down again, holding his hand over the one molten rock, he simply said, "_Bakusai Tenketsu_" and it crumbled. Kasumi saw a bit of yellow catch the light, and then more, until a jagged chunk the length of her thumb and half as wide sat motionless and perfect in the shallow depression. Ryouga carefully plucked the gold nugget out, rolled it into his palm, and blew on it.

"It's amazing!" Kasumi exclaimed, and leaned in to get a closer look. "Can I…?"

"It's still a little hot, but you should be able to hold it," he replied, obviously happy at catching and holding her interest. Kasumi cupped the nugget in her gloved hands, and blew on it a few times, too. Freeing her left hand of its glove, she ran a finger along it. The gold felt smooth and the edges were sharp, but she was careful and rolled it back and forth.

"That was just amazing, Ryouga-kun!" She said again and looked up at him; he swelled with pride in, finally, impressing someone. Yes, he'd been able to impress Akari easily enough, but she had loved him (even his damned _Jyusenkyou _curse), and so he never seemed to even have to try for her to look at him with wonder. For some reason, he thought of Kasumi (like all the Tendo girls) as more world weary, what with all the fighting and chaos and RANMA they had circling around them.

"You like it?" he asked, and shrugged. "It's yours, Kasumi-san. Though I'll ask you not to tell Nabiki where you got it."

Kasumi opened her mouth to say something, but instead enveloped him in a warm hug. Not used to the contact he stiffed sharply, and she released him sensing his discomfort and confusion. Instead, she took a step back, and politely bowed. He bowed back, and anxiously scratched the back of his neck.

"We should probably head back," Ryouga said, and whistled in Shirokuro's direction. The obedient canine picked up the end of her leash with her mouth, and trotted over, seemingly unfazed by the display she had witnessed with Kasumi just a few minutes earlier. Kasumi quickly slipped her left glove back on, and cradling the gold nugget in her hands, she followed Ryouga and his dog back to Seiran Mountain's lower entrance.

"Kasumi-san…" Ryouga interrupted the nice silence they'd both started walking through. They were back in the forest, and under the cover of the canopy of trees.

She stepped over a large log, and once over it, looked at him. "Ryouga-kun?"

"You said before that… a friend is someone you can talk to," he hesitated in his phrasing, not really asking a question, but seemingly afraid to continue as a statement. "Kasumi-san. You know about the cure for Ranma's Jyusenkyou curse, right? And what it will do to him?"

"I heard about it, yes," she confirmed. "Why?"

"I've done some things… things I regret," Ryouga said, and by the way his shoulders slumped, she could tell he was torn between saying nothing, and letting his thoughts pour out like a torrent. "Ranma knows some of it, I guess, but I… I think I want to tell someone about it. Before I forget, and can't say for sure what I did or didn't do."

It didn't take a genius to guess at what he was alluding to. Kasumi gasped, and her expression moved from shocked, to perturbed.

"You have a curse," she stated, and frowned at the back of his head. Kasumi wasn't stupid, nor was she completely clueless. There hadn't been obvious clues, but it wasn't hard to see what he was alluding to, after all the times she had heard Ranma as much as point out his rival's curse, plus the bandanna, and the remarkable agility and durability of P-chan himself. It just seemed… so unlike him, though. "You're…?"

Ryouga sighed softly. "Yeah."

"Oh my," Kasumi finally let her trademark phrase fly. "That's not very nice."

The lost boy didn't offer any disagreement with her statement. He started at the beginning, that fateful and nearly fatal day at Jyusenkyou. It was hard at first, especially knowing she was upset with him, but it became easier the more he talked. Like a great burden taken as far as it could, he threw it all down and freed himself. He was going to take the cure, but before he did, he would tell someone what had happened: every iota of what he had done and felt, because by the end of the day, it would all be gone.

Even as he spoke, he wondered how it would feel, not just to be free of the pig, but free of P-chan entirely. He understood that the cure posed a real problem for Ranma, but for Ryouga Hibiki… it was wonderful release. Secretly, he hoped and prayed that the shower of cursed water would wash away all his feelings for another woman besides the one he had seen die. He hoped and prayed that it would cleanse him of distractions, and pointless old fears and grudges.

Even those warm and happy moments, so few and far between, that came from his time as Akane's beloved pet – even those would be gladly sacrificed. Like before he had come to Nerima, he would hone his hatred to a fine and deadly edge. P-chan had been an indulgence… how much more powerful would he be if he hadn't wasted time playing the part of Akane's pet pig for so long? Would he have been able to save Akari?

Back at the base, alone and naked, Ryouga poured the _Nanniichuan_ water over his head and braced himself as… one by one… his memories as P-chan faded and died. He could barely remember even telling Kasumi about it. In mere moments, time just enough for regrets, it was all gone. Washed down the drain. He was liberated. He was free!

"Why…"

"Why…" he laughed, and reached up to his eyes with trembling hands. "Am I crying…?"

He closed his eyes, and he saw a face he knew. It was Kasumi, and she seemed hurt and saddened by something he had said. What had he told her about? In a vague sense, he knew it related to his curse, but he couldn't remember the specifics of what he had talked about. She was saying something, and he concentrated on remembering it. Surprisingly, it wasn't difficult.

"She'll forgive you."

That had been it.

"I don't want her forgiveness… I don't want to cause unnecessary pain."

"Even if it's the right thing to do?"

"Even if she forgives me, we won't be friends like we were; like we are."

She could see his fear. Smell it even. He didn't want to be hated; he didn't want to be rejected, by Akane or anyone. She would never love him, not when she had Ranma, and even if he wasn't there, he suspected he'd never be more than her friend, with or without P-chan happening. Wasn't it enough to be friends, then? Why did he have to risk that, imperil that, for nothing? For something so ephemeral as honesty?

"If you truly want to be her friend, you will have to be honest." Kasumi's words, even hours later, cut into him and seared his conscience to the core. "Eventually, you will have to tell her."

"I can't," he whispered, tears running down his lips and teeth, remembering how that same response caused a ripple of disappointment in Kasumi's normally serene face. He was cured! He was free! Kasumi, predictably, had forgiven him. Kasumi, predictably, not forsaken him. Kasumi, predictably, had not hated him. Why, then, did her disappointment hurt so much? Why were tears marring his smile?

"I can't…"

Why?


	19. Take Me to War I

The year is 2005. For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. The Nerima Wrecking Crew and their families have been relocated to Seiran Mountain, XCOM headquarters for the Far East. Finally, a mission is sent down for the newly militarized Nerima Wrecking Crew, to cut their teeth against the Alien Menace…

* * *

**The Road To Cydonia**  
_**Chapter VII**  
Take Me to War_

* * *

The tatami mat under Ranma's feet buckled, the force from blocking Ryouga's downward heel kick transferring through his body and into the woven and packed rice straw. Beneath the mat, however, lay an all but indestructible layer of exotic alloys. A blow with the power Ryouga had put into it could have easily punched a hole in the floor, wall, or ceiling of the old Tendo Dojo. This new one, however, was a totally different beast. 

Despite stopping the lost boy's downward momentum, he was still prodigiously strong, and twisting his foot, he pushed off Ranma's crossed forearms with his toes, separating them and buying space to bring his foot back down. Ranma juked to the side, bringing down his right arm to deflect a tiger palm strike that would have hit his sternum, and supporting the move with his left. He kneed up, but Ryouga blocked the blow with his own left hand, and tilted his head to avoid the follow up snap kick.

The lost boy brought his right elbow up, aiming for the bridge of his rival's nose, but Ranma was faster than his opponent, and countered with his left elbow, before straightening his arm and grabbing Ryouga by the inside of his wrist. He ducked, turned, and twisted, stepping out the bandanna'd martial artist's guard, and moving him into an outside arm lock.

It would have been the beginning of the end of the fight with a normal opponent, but both young men were far from normal. Ryouga's style of fighting wasn't typically very agile compared to that of Ranma's 'Anything Goes' or _Musabetsu Kakuto_, but that was not to be mistaken for an inability to take to the air. If he wished to, and if he was motivated to, Ryouga Hibiki could move very quickly and with surprising agility. Rather than succumb to the hold, he fell forward, hit the ground with his left hand, and pushed up, forcing himself into the air.

The leverage advantage lost, Ranma had to let go of the lost boy's wrist, and dance back as the other boy's feet touched the ceiling. Unlike in the old dojo, the ceiling here was smooth, with no surface to cling to with bare feet (not that Ryouga could do so effectively; he'd never had the martial arts tea ceremony training that Ranma had benefited from shortly after the _bakusai tenketsu_ fight). The lost boy had to immediately rebound back to the ground, and the maneuver served both to give him a height advantage and a movement vulnerability.

Typically, Ryouga chose to attack head on, and keep attacking, rather than bounce back and try a less risky approach. Powerful leg muscles, and the inevitable call of gravity, forced him back down, and he spun towards Ranma, one hand forward the other held back. Even before he saw the flickers of _ki_, the pigtailed martial artist recognized the move about to be executed.

"Shishi Hokoudan!" Ryouga thrust his right hand forward, but didn't fully launch his _ki_ projectile. It was a trick Ranma remembered from their second _hokoudan_ duel, like using the _ki_ blast as an extension of his fist. Ranma immediately summoned his confidence; the first time Ryouga had used that trick, he'd had nothing to effectively counter it. That was then.

This was now.

"Moko Takabisha!" Ranma cried, sweeping one hand low, unleashing his reciprocal _ki_ attack. Ryouga's partly dissolved on contact, the two conflicting emotive energies nullifying each other. It was obvious that the lost boy wanted to up the ante, finally, and push the limits of the new dojo. Ranma smirked. He'd been thinking the same thing. With his right hand, he fired off a short series of _ki _blasts.

Ryouga ducked one, and countered the other two with a left hand sheathed in black and green mental energy. He crossed his arms and held his hands at an angle, about forty degrees from front. Energy crackled from his fingertips, and he unleashed dual _shishi hokoudans_ without so much as an announcement.

"A smokescreen!" Ranma hissed, blocking the attacks with his own confidence based _ki _energy. The bright flash and the roar, however, easily masked whatever his opponent had planned next. He searched with his eyes and with his _Sakkijutsu_, but the emotive _ki_ still lingering all around him made it difficult. Instead, he relaxed his stance, and used the _Umisenken_ to fade from sight.

As he fell back to a better position, Ranma could see that the walls of the dojo were unharmed, even by the recent exchange. The new dojo was durable, no doubt about that, but it also presented a very new non-destructive environment for the two fighters inside it.

Not only did hitting the walls really hurt, simply because there was no give to them and they didn't buckle even a fraction, but they made Ryouga's _bakusai tenketsu_ essentially impossible to use. They also made it hard to take a hit from a strong opponent, since you could easily end up hitting the wall and bouncing right off. You could rebound off the walls, yes, but because they didn't bend there was no added outside momentum. More unfortunate for someone of the Anything Goes Style, the dojo itself was relatively bare, and the _Musabetsu Kakuto_ was strongly rooted in using the environment to one's advantage.

"Using the Umisenken, Ranma?" he heard Ryouga's voice, as the lost boy walked up to where Ranma had just been standing. Ranma could see the other boy looking around with his eyes, even though he knew full well that full use of the _Umisenken _Style, or Silent Thief, rendered one invisible to sight and _Sakkijutsu_. Still, there was something to Ryouga's voice that made Ranma wary of jumping headlong into an attack.

Ranma inched around, careful to conceal his _ki_, his intent, and his very presence. The _Umisenken_'s "cloaked" form made it offensively tricky to use. He still had his normal _ki_ enhanced strength, speed and durability, but he couldn't use them without momentarily breaking the invisibility effect. In a way, it would be similar to his normal way of fighting Ryouga, which was to set him up for a series of very powerful blows, aiming for a knock out.

Ryouga's constitution during the first _bakusai tenketsu_ fight had been frightening – it had taken hundreds of blows to the same spot on his body to hurt him, and rather special circumstances to actually knock him into momentary unconsciousness. Ranma had gotten stronger since then, and his stamina had improved, while Ryouga's insane durability hadn't improved much at all (mostly because he wasn't routinely plowing face first into boulders anymore). Still, Ranma knew he had to be careful when he used his _amaguriken _punch technique against Ryouga. He could still exhaust himself without managing a KO if he didn't set up his blows properly.

Finally, he was in place.

"Hakuda Toshin Shou!" he whispered, his hands blurring as he passed behind the lost boy. The first time he'd used the attack on Ryu Kumon, it had sent him to the ground, stunned. Ryouga, however, was made of sterner stuff, and he whirled, a crescent kick passing just an inch from Ranma's right cheek as he jumped back and reactivated the _Umisenken's _stealth mode.

The 'White Snake Spitting True Palm' was the main offensive maneuver of the _Umisenken_ that didn't rely on being in a grapple with the enemy or throwing the enemy's attack back at them. It normally left a series of painful welts on the back of the opponent, from the many rapid and powerful piercing blows. Ryouga, however, seemed mostly unharmed. As expected, it would have to be beefed up a bit to be more effective.

Ryouga was turning now, rather than standing still and waiting for a chance to counterattack. Ranma slipped just close enough to attack his back, when Ryouga turned again, facing him directly, forcing Ranma to back off again. This was unlike the high intensity of their normal fights, but the pigtailed boy found himself really enjoying the change of pace. It was a little more cerebral than their normal spars. Ryouga had earlier boasted that he could find a counter for the _Umisenken_, since he had seen it back when they'd attacked the alien ship, and Ranma was eager to see if he could manage it.

"Hakuda Toshin Shou Kaiteiban: Dokuja!"

Ranma lingered a second longer than he'd planned executing the move (it didn't help that the name itself was rather long), and paid for it with a back kick to the stomach that sent him skidding off the ground and into a wall. He recovered quickly, guarding his injured abdomen as he jumped to his feet, expecting a follow up from the lost boy. Ryouga, however, seemed to be reeling from the improved attack Ranma had used on him. Tossing off his yellow shirt, Ranma could see that the "Revised: Poisonous Serpent" variant of the attack had left a series of bloody wounds on Ryouga's back. Still, he hadn't been knocked off his feet, and his expression indicated he didn't want to stop the fight.

Ranma wondered why he hadn't at least tried to charge, or otherwise prevent Ranma going into the _Umisenken_ form again, but didn't question the lost boy's hesitation. While he didn't exactly like hurting anyone, he was happy to see that his revised attack had been a success. Mostly. It had been difficult and exhausting to execute, striking each spot a hundred times, and his arms felt like silly putty. Even worse, it had taken long enough to give Ryouga a chance to counterattack.

Ranma's opponent, meanwhile, reached up to his yellow and black bandanna with his right hand. He kept moving erratically, but slowly, circling so his back was never in the same place. In his hands, he began to spin his bandannas, forcing _ki_ into them. They quickly straightened and sharpened. Ranma knew very well what Ryouga could do with his bandanna shuriken trick, and considered him far more dangerous with them than Konatsu with his ninja stars or Ukyou with her mini-spatulas. He'd seen one cut cleanly through a tree once…

Ranma froze, as Ryouga threw his bandannas, his arms snapping to his sides. None came anywhere near the pigtailed boy, but it didn't seem like Ryouga had thrown them randomly or haphazardly either. They all imbedded into the tatami mats, roughly equidistant to their thrower, circling the lost boy like the hours of a clock. Ranma moved carefully, keeping his distance from the nearest bandanna. He was about to move for another strike at Ryouga's back, when he felt something in midair brush against his skin.

Looking down at it, surprised, he saw an extremely fine wire… no: it was just a bit of string, hardened to the strength of wire. He tensed to move, jumping up and away, but it was too late. One of Ryouga's fingers tucked in, and then two more and in an instant Ranma felt the steel-cable strength string wrap around him. His arms became pinned to his side, but his feet were still free, and he jumped, spinning in midair, trying to unwrap himself.

Like an ensnared insect, Ryouga turned and pulled his rival towards him. Ranma could see the lost boy lifting one foot, a second before he saw stars. If Ryouga had pulled the blow, it wasn't by much, and Ranma felt himself corkscrew through the air and hit the ground. If anything, he was fortunate, since the rough landing shook him up enough to keep him conscious.

"Still breathing, Ranma?" Ryouga asked, and Ranma felt himself go airborne again. He struggled against the wires binding his sides, but true to the so called 'Iron Cloth Technique" the strands of Ryouga's bandannas were suffused with his _ki_, and impossible to break from his current position. Only his feet were free. Seeing that the lost boy was about to repeat the earlier blow, Ranma gritted his teeth and came up with a desperate ploy.

"You're finished, Ranmaaa!" Ryouga lifted his leg slightly, setting up for a devastating kick to Ranma's midsection.

"Goshin Ryü Sei Fu!" Ranma bent his leg, in a motion that would make a contortionist proud, and reached into his shirt with his right foot. The "Self-Protection Falling Star Cloth" was meant to be taken out with your hands, though the last time he'd used the technique, he'd made due with one hand and his mouth. He desperately flipped out the black and red cloth wrapper, and held it between his feet, using the strength he'd built up in his toes from learning martial arts tea ceremony.

The cloth served as a makeshift shield, blocking and then wrapping around Ryouga's foot as he tried his snap kick. A measure of control lost over the situation, Ranma shifted his center of balance, and pulled off another improvised revision version of an _Umisenken_ technique.

"Ri Giyo Hon Shin!" Flipping down next to Ryouga's left foot, Ranma pulled back and in with his legs, throwing Ryouga off his balance and into the air. The "Carp Fish Bodyflip" was supposed to be used over an opponent's head once he was blinded and choking, but the makeshift version would work just as effectively on Ryouga's trapped foot. Ranma twisted even before the lost boy hit the ground, putting pressure on his opponent's trapped appendage. Ryouga's hissed in pain, as his ankle twisted.

That was one way around Ryouga's constitution: he was still vulnerable having his joints manipulated. The lost boy's concentration on the cloth-turned-wires wavered due to the pain, and with a grunt of effort, Ranma broke free. Before he could plan anything else, however, Ryouga palm's shot out in his direction.

"Oh geez…" He quickly covered his face and shielded himself.

Ryouga's hands erupted with _ki_. "Shishi Hokoudan!"

Ranma finally came to a stop at the far end of the dojo, his arms and body smoking. He had barely been able to shield himself with confident "light" _ki_, and what he had managed to call up hadn't been quite equal in gross quantity to the depressive, angry "heavy" _ki_ that Ryouga so readily pumped out. By the time Ranma got back to his feet, he saw that his opponent was also up and about, and holding his 'shooting star cloth' as well.

Both were breathing heavily, flickers of waning energy sparking off their bodies. Hit by the lull in the fighting, Ranma ran his tongue over his teeth, and confirmed that they were all still there. Still, his lower lip was busted open and bleeding, and so was a cut in the inside of his mouth. A few flecks of blood on the ground were testament to the wounds on Ryouga's back. The lost one shook his hands, the wires still going between his fingers and his bandannas hopelessly tangled.

"That was a pretty nice trick," Ranma commented, smiling cockily. "But do you think it'll work a second time?"

"Probably not," Ryouga admitted and sighed. "Why don't you use the Umisenken again and find out?"

"It isn't like I don't like beating you normally… but since you asked for it!" Ranma let out a long, deep breath, and assumed the ghost-like _Umisenken_ stance. He wondered if Ryouga knew the trick to beating it – that you had to make the person using the stance angry, and unbalance his neutral _ki_. It was likely that he did know that so called secret, but that it wasn't particularly reliable. Just like Ranma didn't think he could defeat every '_perfect shishi hokoudan_' by lying about being able to see Akane's panties or about kissing her. Though at least that last one now had a basis in truth.

He smiled.

"Problem?" Ryouga asked, looking over his shoulder at the now visible Ranma.

Ranma laughed embarrassingly. "Sorry. My mind strayed."

"You're lucky I don't eagerly take cheap shots," the other boy replied, and actually stood by and let Ranma get back into the invisible Thousand Sea Fist. Ranma made a quick note about not thinking about Akane when using the technique. He circled Ryouga, looking for an opening. Unfortunately, the lost boy had his cloth stuffed into his belt, and it was an important tool in the _Umisenken_'s repertoire.

He swooped in; aiming to steal back the cloth, but Ryouga whirled in his direction, and lashed out with a backhand. Ranma easily ducked under it and jumped back, taking the cloth in the process, but it worried him how the lost boy had guessed his angle of approach. As far as he knew, he wasn't making any sound to give himself away, and it seemed improbable that he was being tracked by smell.

He made another approach, this time zigzagging. Ryouga moved on the balls of his feet, and faced Ranma's general direction. His aim was slightly off, however, and the pigtailed martial artist slipped under his guard, struck him in the neck, and got around to his back. He began the _Hakuda Toshin Shou Kaiteiban: Dokuja_, but Ryouga spun like a top, and hit Ranma in the shoulder, barely avoiding his cheek. Ranma jumped back, and faded away in midair.

While in the air, Ranma noted that Ryouga's eyes darted back and forth, but then when he soundlessly landed on a tatami mat, the lost boy zeroed in on his location. Ranma jumped again, testing his theory, and sure enough the other fighter again began to looking around, as if having lost a sense of where his opponent was. When Ranma landed in a different spot, Ryouga slowly turned to face it.

'Something to do with the ground,' Ranma thought, moving slowly. 'Probably vibrations. But the mats here are straw. How could he sense vibrations through them? He can't even use the Bakusai Tenketsu on the stuff.'

'Well…' Ranma tensed up the muscles in his legs. 'I guess I'll just beat the answer out of him…'

He jumped, hit the ceiling, and rebounded down towards his target. It wouldn't quite be the equal of a shooting star kick, like he'd used against Taro's cursed monster form, but combined with a rapid hundred-blow combo to the back of the head, it would do the trick. Except, instead of looking lost, the so-called lost boy looked up right at him. He brought his left hand up, and pulled the right one back.

Ranma cursed silently, and summoned up his _ki_ to defend himself, appearing in midair. Ryouga's unannounced _shishi hokoudan_ wasn't anywhere near full strength, and Ranma quickly realized that it was only intended to force him to reveal himself. His current trajectory couldn't be changed, and he'd counted on the element of surprise. Ryouga jumped up, deflecting Ranma's extended leg with his left hand, and introduced his rising fist to the pigtailed martial artist's jaw with all the power and subtlety of a jackhammer.

Normally, it would have sent Ranma twenty or more feet into the air, but there wasn't enough room for that. He hit the ceiling, and bounced off like a pinball before slamming into the padded floor with a loud crunch. The tatami mat under him didn't break only by virtue of the fact that the floor underneath it was effectively indestructible. He blacked out for a few seconds, and when he came to, he saw Ryouga sitting next to him, his legs crossed.

Ranma hit the floor with his fist, and lifted himself up. He could see blood, and he tenderly reached up to his nose. His fingers came back crimson, and the cartilage that formed below the bridge of his nose hurt like hell. He saw Ryouga, looking at him expectantly, and silently nodded. They'd decided not to talk too much about who "won" their sparring matches, and instead focus on what had worked and how. They weren't real formal matches, anyway, so Ranma didn't mind… not winning them. Plus, it wasn't like Ryouga hadn't made a contest out of things before. It was nothing too new or unmanning.

Besides, he knew in a fair fight, outside the dojo where his style had an advantage, he'd be able to beat the lost boy ten times out of ten. Of course Ryouga didn't concede this fact. The two sat in silence for a while, checking their respective injuries, and then looking around the Dojo. It was essentially undamaged, save for a few bloody and split tatami mats.

"Good match," Ranma finally offered. They'd had to delay breaking in the new Dojo for a day, but it had been worth it. Ranma grinned broadly. "Good fight!"

Ryouga nodded. "Good match, Ranma. Good fight."

Ranma touched his nose again, and snorted loudly as he inhaled. "I think you broke something."

The lost boy shrugged at the remark. "Bone?"

Ranma snorted again, feeling up and down his nose. "Na…nah. Should be fine in a day or two. How's the ankle?"

"It'll swell up tonight, but should be alright by tomorrow," Ryouga replied, not sounding really inconvenienced by the injury.

"What was with that stuff at the end there?" Ranma asked, folding his legs and resting his hands behind him. "Did you actually see me, and pretend that you didn't?"

Ryouga grunted in a tired way, but he wasn't about to dismiss answering the question, especially since Ranma had been courteous enough to keep using the _Umisenken_. They weren't enemies anymore, and some sharing of techniques and other things were expected. Of course, most of Ranma's techniques weren't well adapted to Ryouga's fighting style, and vice versa, so there wasn't a huge risk of technique thievery. Not like when he'd first showed Ranma the _Shishi Hokoudan_.

"I did pretend not to be able to follow you when you jumped," Ryouga explained, after a few seconds composing his thoughts. "It seemed like a good opportunity to set a trap. But I couldn't really see you… I could only get a vague sense of where you were."

"How'd ya do it, though?" Ranma asked, snorting again. His nose was already pretty badly clogged up.

"It's like when you tripped the wires before," Ryouga said, looking across the room at the now limp bandannas still embedded in a half dozen straw mats around the dojo floor.

"Air pressure?" Ranma asked, intrigued. "Some inner ear trick?"

"No…" Ryouga huffed. "You know my Bakusai Tenketsu is when I put my _ki_ into rocks, or metal? I can do that to liquids, too. Almost anything inanimate. A solid and a liquid and a gas are all the same things right? Just… states of matter with more or less energy in them. I diffused my _ki_ into the air, like I would with the ground, and sensed the ripples you made in it."

"Not bad, man!" Ranma slapped him cheerfully on the shoulder. "You got a name for it?"

"Unlike some people, I don't name my moves unless I've got them working properly beforehand," Ryouga replied, but smiled a bit. "I was thinking Sokumen Sen Seiri – Lateral Line Physiology. Since it's sort of like a fish in the water."

Ranma groaned, and slowly got to his feet. "Well… you better get your back looked at. I'll walk ya to the medlab."

Ryouga nodded, and also got up. He reached over his shoulder, and dabbed one of his fingers into one of the red wounds Ranma had made. It stung pretty badly, and his finger came back with crusted blood. He hadn't expected the pigtailed boy to come up with an attack more potent than his current _amaguriken_ fist.

"You'll probably need a few stitches for those," Ranma observed, but didn't apologize. They were both martial artists, and they had both agreed that their fights, while not meant to be life threatening, were not to be taken lightly either. An apology would have just been seen as one of them looking at the other like he was weak and needed to be coddled.

"Eh," Ryouga said with a dismissing shrug. As they walked by his shirt, he picked it up but didn't bother putting it on. The dojo was well placed near the base medical facilities, so they weren't looking at a long walk. Opening the door, they actually entered the second dojo, which was reserved for training instead of duels. It was longer, not a perfect square, and still under construction.

The sound of clapping got their attention, and they saw Soun and Genma (replete in orange work clothes and yellow hard hat) approaching with Akane trailing behind them. She had a hard hat as well, but regular clothes: a civilian shirt and pants. She looked a little concerned about their physical state, bleeding and bruised as they plainly were.

"An amazing fight! We watched behind the one way wall," Soun said, smiling and plainly happy that the new dojo design had withstood such a furious battle. Had bystanders been in the dojo, both boys had little doubt they'd have had to hold back, if only to keep things safe. With a one-way mirror wall, somehow using a transparent version of the alien alloy material, anyone could watch even the most dangerous fight in safety.

"I can't say I approve of unsealing the Umisenken, even now, but that was an impressive display," Genma commented, his stern expression juxtaposed by his pride in his son, and by _proxy_, his techniques and training.

"Yeah, yeah," Ranma replied, lightly, rolling his eyes but grinning widely.

"What did you think of the dojo, Ranma? Ryouga?" Akane pursed her lips, worried about their injuries, but didn't mention it, knowing both boy's pride in their martial arts lifestyle.

"It's a little constricting," Ranma began, crossing his arms as he thought of anything else to mention or suggest. "You said it's a little bigger than the old one, but it feels a bit smaller. You should probably put up some padding or something for the walls, too. A weaker guy could break his neck hitting that thing."

"You're supposed to bounce off walls, not go through them," Ryouga interjected, and his criticism was more positive. "It is very sturdy, and well suited to more technical fights. Not everyone wants to bounce around when they fight, so I like the size."

"Except the Dojo is designed to teach Saotome and Tendo Style 'Anything Goes' Martial Arts, and that means motion, contemplation, and counter attack. How often does anyone fight a real world battle in a square room?" Ranma then relented to practicality. "Still, since we can't build a 'Danger Room' or anything, it'll do."

"High praise," Akane quipped.

Ranma opened his mouth to retort, but Ryouga coughed, and the other boy nodded his head. "I'll see you guys later, ok?"

The two made a few short goodbyes to the trio, and continued to the medlab.

"Hey, Ranma," Ryouga said, once they were in the hallway and outside the earshot of anyone else. "I… I wanted to say thanks for agreeing to this mission. I know you weren't… eager to do it."

Ranma wanted, in that instant, to be indignant about having to put everyone in danger just because the lost boy needed to get back at the ones who had killed his girlfriend. Except he couldn't. If someone had killed Akane, he'd have been frothing at the mouth to strike back at them as soon as possible, whether or not it made sense, and even if it put his friends in danger. It wasn't a realization he was particularly proud of, but he knew down to his bones, down to his very cells, that it was the truth.

Love made you stupid like that.

"Yeah," Ranma replied noncommittally, his thoughts and feelings his own and no one else's. Entering the medlab, both wondered if they'd see Kasumi, but instead they were sent to be treated by another doctor and nurse they didn't know. In a half hour, they were eager to leave and be on their way.

And get back to work.

-----


	20. Take Me to War II

Kuno, Konatsu and Ukyou were the last three to arrive at the meeting, following a silent trip up the elevator and towards the Conference Room. It was a mutual sort of silence, not out of dislike, but out of a basic lack of anything to discuss. On or off duty, Kuno tended to be aloof and somewhat difficult to approach, and neither Ukyou nor Konatsu had any real incentive to try their luck.

All three wore the same basic uniform, but over the last week they had grown comfortable enough with it to make some customizations to break the general monotony and homogeneity it engendered. Kuno, of course, had ordered a handsome leather and steel chassis for his bokken, since he had been forbidden to wield the Kuno family sword in the base. Konatsu, deprived of being able to formally dress like a female ninja, or kunoichi, had to settle for a red bow and lipstick to complete the illusion of a pretty girl. Not considering them normal weapons in the conventional sense, Ukyou had been permitted to carry a bandolier sporting a half dozen of her mini-spatulas.

All three had, just the night before, received emails informing them that there had been an important development in their training schedule, and that they would get the details in a mandatory group meeting that afternoon. Ranma and Ryouga had been the first two in the room; fitting since they were the ones presenting the 'important development' and as such they had printed out several documents for their teammates and laid them out beforehand. Ukyou saw Shampoo sitting a few chairs removed from the others, reading through a stapled together document.

It quickly became obvious that their seating was assigned by the name on the papers in front of each chair at the conference table, and Ukyou saw that she was given a spot in the middle of the two groups. It wasn't hard to determine the general arrangement: there were eight chairs to each long side of the table, but they were all lined up on the same side, Ryouga's team in the left four chairs, Ranma's in the right. Mousse sat on the far left, followed by Kuno, then the boy she knew the least about: Ryu Kumon. She took her seat next to him, and Konatsu sat between her and Shampoo, at the far right of the table.

To her surprise, the boys to her left all nodded in polite greeting to each other. It was a gesture she couldn't remember seeing between Mousse and Kuno before, and she wondered how well the lost boy's group had managed to get along. Did they have some kind of dynamic? They seemed to, and Ukyou felt a pang of jealousy. She was happy to be with her Ran-chan, of course, but it would be nice to be in a circle of friends. Konatsu had an obvious crush on her, which she had exploited easily before for criminally low wage labor in her restaurant, but he wasn't really a friend or a peer in her eyes. Shampoo was an enemy at best, a rival at worst.

She looked up at the large projection screen pulled down and put against the wall opposite them, and saw that Ranma and Ryouga were still setting up whatever it was they were supposed to present. She caught herself and kept from giggling at the sight. No doubt Ryouga, that plan-wrecking jackass, had caused some sort of problem and it was up to Ranma to fix it. Not that she could tell, but it would be typical. In light of that, it seemed like they had a little extra time.

She looked to her left, and at the Kumon boy. He was tall, though not quite as much as Kuno, and built more heavily than the swordsman. He had exceptionally black hair that spilled out over his white bandanna, drawing the inevitable comparison to a certain Nerima regular, and black fingerless leather gloves. When she'd seen him before he'd tended to have a very serious look to him, but here he seemed more relaxed and at ease with his surroundings and present company. He also seemed to sense her studying him, even if she'd been quick and rather discrete about it.

"Miss Kounji, right?" he asked, and his eyes quickly went over her face and neck.

"Mr. Kumon," she said back, and looked away from him, a little embarrassed by being looked at like that. She certainly hadn't been on the receiving end of those looks much since she'd renounced her femininity, and even back at Furinkan when she'd started dressing more normally. Still, Ranma had called her cute, and she thought she was comparatively pretty, so it wasn't like she had self-esteem problems. She just wasn't used to concerted male attention like that.

Suddenly a little more self conscious, she adjusted the white scrunchie that held back her brown hair. Ryu stared at her just a little longer, and then turned his head after Mousse asked something that raised Kuno's ire. Well, she figured, at least she always had Konatsu's attention, and that was better than nothing.

"You assume so blithely that you are ready to face the blade of Tatewaki Kuno? Methinks you rate yourself too highly, blind fool!"

Mousse lolled his head back in faux ignorance. "Isn't that what you told Ryu before he kicked your ass?"

"It was something to that effect," Ryu answered

Kuno crossed his arms in a dour pout. "I was not expecting such unorthodox attacks. He will not be so lucky a second time, nor will you a first."

"We'll see…" Mousse smirked, his thick glasses glinting in the light.

"Have you guys been fighting?" Ukyou asked, interrupting them and leaning forward with her right elbow on the table.

"Haven't you been training with Ranma?" Mousse asked, pre-empting the other two boys who were less well acquainted with her.

Ukyou shook her head. "Not really. We mostly train by ourselves."

"Why don't you spar with that other girl?" Ryu asked, and then remembered her name. "Shampoo, isn't it? Or your cross dresser friend?"

"As if I'd waste my time training with an amateur," Shampoo spoke up from the end of the table. Konatsu seemed to want to say something, but he didn't really have the inclination to burst into an already heated discussion.

"Amateur!" Ukyou whirled around, fire in her eyes. "AMATEUR!"

"Are you short of hearing, too?" Shampoo replied with a wide grin. "Let me spell it in plain simple English: A M A T E U R."

"Why don't you say half of that in coherent Japanese?" Ukyou gasped. "Oh, that's right. You can't!"

"At least I learned another language!"

"Badly!"

"Which one of them is stronger, anyway?" Ryu asked, instantly diverting the two girl's attentions. Kuno and Mousse just exchanged looks and shrugged. Before Shampoo and Ukyou could start up again, Ranma and Ryouga cleared their throats, again shifting the attention of the groups, this time to them. Both looked rather irate, either at the trouble they'd had, or the immaturity of some of their teammates, it was hard to tell which.

"All right," Ranma spoke up, while Ryouga walked around the table to one of the chairs at the narrow ends of the conference table. Behind the pigtailed martial artist, the projection screen displayed a field of black.

"Welcome, everyone. Me and Ryouga have got some important stuff to show you." Ranma coughed, a little nervous about what he had to talk about, and how. He'd had to do class presentations at Furinkan, and he'd never been very comfortable with the role. "This is about our upcoming mission assignment."

"Mission assignment?" Konatsu finally spoke up, his mezzo-soprano voice belying his true gender. "I thought we had at least another week or two of training?"

"We should still have that," Ranma assured them, and reached down to the laptop he and Ryouga had been working on. Behind him, the screen changed to display a standard security clearance warning.

"Before I begin," the pigtailed boy noted. "I have to inform you that the following information is classified Angel/0A, and that the mission outline and background we will also cover is Archangel/1B. You can talk to your mentors about it, but otherwise keep it under wraps, got it?"

Ranma pressed a key on the laptop, and the presentation moved forward, changing the projected picture to that of a map of East Asia. There were several red dots marked prominently on the map: four in Japan, four in the Korean Peninsula (all in the south), and two in northeastern China, the Shandong Peninsula, just inland from the coast. Each was labeled with a date, and a set of exact geographical coordinates in latitude and longitude.

"What we've got here is information on alien cattle mutilations," Ranma explained, and pivoted to look at the map with the rest of them. "Many of these were also accompanied by abductions which resulted in… missing persons. There are ten here over a five week period. In addition to an estimated one hundred animals, of several types, eleven people have been abducted and are presumed dead, four of them Japanese."

Ranma glanced over to Ryouga, but the lost boy sat calmly, with his eyes closed and arms crossed. What only the two of them knew, among all the martial artists present, was that Akari and her grandfather were two of those four fatalities. Ranma's counterpart had not told him much about what he remembered from the ordeal, but he could tell it was something beyond horrible.

"Our countrymen have been slain by these foul creatures!" Kuno pounded the table with his fist. "Justice must be meted out swiftly and terribly! How could such a travesty happen on our soil!"

"Why weren't they shot down?" Ukyou asked, more reasonably. "Um… Intercepted? Like they did the other day?"

"Well, firstly… when multiple UFOs are detected, priority is not generally given to intercepting those on a Harvesting mission. More to the point in this case," Ranma explained, pointing to the red dots around Japan, almost all in the north – three in Honshu, one in Hokkaido. "Intercepting a UFO requires that it be detected in flight, which is difficult. Alien ships have a sorta stealth technology, which makes it hard to track them using radar."

"From what me and Ryouga were told, this is probably the work of two ships doing something called 'puddle jumping.' Instead of visiting the planet and leaving, they're flying real low and landing somewhere between missions, probably a lake or river or real thick forest. There is also a possibility that they are using an alien base somewhere in the area, probably in North Korea."

"Why North Korea?" Shampoo asked, by this point focused on the mission and dangers ahead.

"Because those idiots made a deal with the aliens," Ranma said, and shook his head in undisguised disgust. "It's pretty much friendly territory for them. UNETCO isn't supposed to operate in their airspace either, but they still do anyway. The charter says to protect the planet, all of it, and that's what we're going to do."

"What the aliens're doing here is tough to stop, as long as they've got a base on the ground." Ranma noticed that the group was looking at him hopefully, and he smiled. "But there's a plan to stop em, so don't worry about that. Based on flight patterns and missing animals and stuff, some of the science types made some projections about where the aliens are likely to attack next. Commander Yasuda tells me that they're already set up listening devices in those areas, or somethin like that, so we'll know when they come out of hiding."

"Our job will be to storm their ship when they land and take it intact," Ranma finally said, revealing their new mission. A few chairs squeaked as the eager martial artists that were assembled looked at each other and made aggrandizing remarks. Kuno and Ryu looked eager for a fight, and so did Ukyou. Shampoo and Mousse were rather more subdued, but obviously anxious to do something. Konatsu was quiet. He didn't look afraid, but he had had a close run in with the aliens during the attack on Nerima, and it had left him cautious.

"Heavenly justice shall find them; a swift and righteous end to evil lives!" Kuno boasted.

"So what're we up against?" Ryu asked, cracking his knuckles.

"Ryouga?" Ranma nodded to the lost boy, and walked to his seat at the end of the table closest to his group. The bandanna clad martial artists got back up, and took his position where Ranma had just been. He pressed a key on the laptop, and the screen changed. This time it showed an isometric picture of a three-tiered ship, octagonal with smooth, round surfaces.

Next to it, the three tiers were outlined by floor plans. The first floor had a wide-open area, its areas marked off with labels like "Alien Storage" and another described as "Surgery Apparatus." There was a smaller triangular area, with a square representing a "gravity lift" and a door to the "engine room" which was planted right in the center of the first floor, in a rectangle blocked off by "reinforced alien alloy walls." Another rectangle on the first floor, possessing another gravity lift, and encapsulated by walls of alien alloys, ran adjacent to the engine room and out to the outer hull; it was labeled "Entrance Alpha." Another door was indicated in the hull, leading directly into the storage and surgery area, called "Entrance Beta."

Above that, on the second floor, there was a square room, directly above Entrance Alpha, with a door leading to another triangular room that led down to the engine room. Two other doors led to a smaller area, also marked for storage, shaped like a ladle. At the two ends of the ladle shaped area, smaller triangular rooms contained gravity lifts, obviously leading to the third floor. There was also another door in the middle of the 'ladle shaft' that oddly led out to the surgery area the floor below. Anyone going through it could jump down, or float down, since more than a few aliens had that capability.

The third floor was the simplest. Each of the lifts led to larger triangular rooms than the ones on the second floor. Up against one side of the ship, between the lift rooms, a small antechamber ran in a short rectangle. The rest of the third floor was one large room, and labels there indicated 3C: command, control, and communications.

"This is the ship we will have to assault," Ryouga said, speaking more slowly than Ranma, but more succinctly. "I want all of you to memorize this layout. It is a typical Alien Harvester. Thirty-two meters in diameter, over five hundred cubic meters of internal volume… think of it like a big house with indestructible walls."

"Indestructible?" Shampoo asked, in English. "What about the Breaking Point?"

"Alien alloys don't have breaking points as far as I can tell. None of us will be able to break through using raw strength," Ryouga conceded, strongly disliking this fact. It obviously didn't sit well with the other Nerimites, either. They were used to being able to smash through walls or other obstacles as necessary.

"If necessary," he added. "We can requisition a M150 PAM. This is a 'Penetrating Augmented Munition' equivalent to ninety one kilograms of C4."

"Ninety one kilograms of high explosive?" Ukyou was familiar with bombs, since she used explosives as part of one of her techniques. 91 kilos was about twice her weight. By the name, she could guess that it was a shaped charge, too. That was a mind-boggling amount of force.

"Two charges of that size are recommended to open a man sized breach in the hull of a UFO," Ryouga informed her with a straight face. He wasn't kidding or exaggerating, and she deflated a bit, overawed by the information. Just what were they getting into?

"As I was saying. I want all of you to memorize these floor plans. Ranma and I will be holding another meeting at a later time to discuss more detailed strategies, but I can quickly point out the objectives we will need to secure. First, we will have to eliminate all of the crew… except (if it can be helped) for the leader or the navigator, who are likely to be on the bridge."

"Interrogation?" Mousse asked, sounding familiar with the concept.

"The goal of this mission isn't just to stop this one ship. It is to find the location of the base it is operating from. Which means we should approach all the enemies on the third level in a non lethal fashion." Ryouga didn't seem to enjoy that bit of advice, and he quickly moved on, pointing to other areas on the floor plan. "Aside from the bridge, we will have to secure the engine room and the fuel there. If we encounter any civilians, they will likely be here, in the surgery area. If they are in danger, you have permission to free them. If they are restrained, but safe, it is better to leave them be until after the mission."

"What if that puts them in danger?" Konatsu asked. "Shouldn't we free anyone we find as soon as possible?"

"No," Ryouga answered, curtly. "This is a secret organization, remember? Standard Operating Procedure dictates that any survivors must be screened properly, and be kept out of the way whenever possible."

"It is believed that the crew is mixed, a combination of two alien species. The first are the sectiods, or grays." Ryouga keyed up the next screen, which showed both a picture of the small, creepy bulbous creature alive and unharmed, and a picture of it splayed out on an operating table. Luckily, no one present was the squeamish type.

"You'll find more information on these things in the stuff we printed out," Ryouga began, and paused to let the other martial artists open the papers that had been placed in front of their seats. "There is a library in the Archives room, and sometime over the next few days, I think we all should go to the morgue and see a corpse first hand."

"The presence of sectoids means we will have to be on alert for psionic attack," the lost boy turned back to face the screen. "Some of these creatures are capable of telekinesis equivalent to a _ki_ or aura attack. They can paralyze you with a thought, cause you to panic, or even control your mind. Ranma and I killed one before… but if it had been either of us alone…"

Ryouga growled, but it sounded more remorseful than angry.

"Lastly," he said, and changed the screen again, this time revealing a more humanoid and properly proportioned creature, save for the fact that much of its torso and lower body was a smooth metallic container that reached down to around where its knees should have been. "We can expect these as well: Floaters. That … thing replacing their lower body holds their vital organs and allows them to hover in the air. Silently, too. They generally have little to no psionic ability, no _ki_, so it shouldn't be difficult to kill them."

"That is," Ranma clarified, speaking up from his seat. "There is a small chance that they may have some martial arts abilities of their own, and some mastery of _ki_."

"_Ki_ attacks?" Mousse asked. While he considered Ranma and Ryouga his peers, and even rivals in a roundabout way (more rivals-by-association than anything), he was the only one of the trio without a real _ki_ attack of his own.

"There's no way to know for sure," Ranma explained. "But you all should be aware of the possibility."

"Also," Ryouga spoke up, changing the subject. "Because of the nature of this mission, which can be activated at any time, day or night, we will have to suspend any trips far from the base…"

He started towards his seat, but paused, and turned towards the other martial artists. Unlike even a moment before, there was a burning intensity to his daze, and a haunted, obsessive look. He tilted his head forward, and looked from one of them to the other, from Mousse to Shampoo.

"This mission is very important; let's all do our best to train," he said, and though his words were innocuous enough, every person present could feel the tingle of killer intent emanating from the lost boy. He then took his seat, and cupped his hands in front of him. Opposite Ryouga, at the far other end of the conference table, Ranma alone knew the truth.

Ryouga had volunteered them, again, and against Ranma's better judgment. Commander Yasuda hadn't forced this mission on them. She had said that it might have been too difficult for a first run in with the aliens. Ranma had agreed, and preferred to delay any real missions for at least another week, preferably two. Ryouga, however, wanted – or maybe needed – to take this mission. The ship they were after, the aliens they were hunting, were the ones that had, safe and secure in their hidden base, killed Akari right before his eyes.

Ryouga had a naturally vengeful personality. Hell, he had somehow hunted Ranma down from Japan to China and back again, despite not knowing any spoken or written Chinese beforehand, and not having any contacts or information on where his enemy had gone. And that was over a missed fight and some stolen bread! Ranma couldn't imagine what Ryouga felt, even as close to despair as he came when Akane almost died in Jusendo. The taste of his aura, however, and the murderous intention he had behind his eyes, betrayed him.

Ranma just hoped the lost boy's bloodlust didn't get anyone killed.

That was something he wouldn't forgive himself or Ryouga for.

"From this point on, until the mission has been completed, it will be referred to as Operation: Zebra." Ranma narrowed his eyes at his group in particular. "When the time comes… everybody will follow the orders they are given. Everybody will fight. And everybody will come home."

* * *

**From**: Sqd. 1stclass. Shampoo  
**Sent**: Saturday, November 11, 2006, 00:10  
**To**: SSgt. Linda Kinoshida  
**Subject**: Journal Submission 

I'll just cut and paste – OK?

Journal Entry: November 4

I met with Ranma and the others in the morning, and we practiced marksmanship. The girly boy (I-don't-know-his-last-name Konatsu) showed some improvement, and the boyish girl (Kounji Ukyou) was a little better, too. Ranma spent extra time with them, which I thought was unfair. He should have been practicing with me, since he learns very fast, and I am still better with a rifle. It is better to have two very good fighters with a weapon than one good one and three mediocre ones. I think.

After that, we went to the library to study the creatures we are supposed to fight, and their ship. I do not think they were the same types that attacked Nerima and killed Great Grandmother. They are too weak, I think. A man showed us how to access library information from the computers in our room and but I prefer to read things on paper.

Last week you suggested that I get to know the other people here better, even if I didn't like them. So I tried to see what they were doing every day with a different person. I decided to visit with the boy I didn't know, named Kumon Ryu. He was practicing his martial arts at the shooting range indoors. He is not as good a fighter as Ranma, but he is definitely better than stupid Mousse.

* * *

"Kijin Raishu Dan!" Ryu could be heard from either entrance of the indoor shooting range, his deep voice booming especially loud as he shouted that last syllable of the powerful _Yamasenken_ technique. The range wasn't empty; in addition to the hissing sound of Ryu's attack as it shot downrange, there was also the relatively silent rapport of someone firing a laser rifle. 

Shampoo had seen the laser weapons used by XCOM before, and though she hadn't practiced with one yet, she was thinking about giving it a try. The sniper rifles they were practicing with were largely obsolete, fallen out of favor with soldiers who preferred the T-7A2 ALR, or Advanced Laser Rifle. As she walked down the range, holding her MSG-90, she saw a man she didn't recognize using the weapon in conjunction with the helmet that went with his personal armor.

Her pedagogical instruction had left a basic imprint of the weapons technology used by XCOM, containing information she otherwise never would have had. As the man fired, there was a sound like someone lightly clapping their hands, and the target downrange registered a hit in the center of the target. The actual laser beam was invisible to the human eye, but she could see a faint trail of steam in the air that marked its passage. It was the nature of the laser, creating both steam and ionizing the air it passed through; normally this caused a mild boom, but the laser rifle mitigated this somewhat by firing a low power laser a millisecond before the high powered beam was emitted, preemptively ionizing the air. The only recoil from the weapon was due to air being ejected from the sleeve surrounding the barrel.

The man glanced at her as she walked behind him, and then went back to his practice. Shampoo wondered briefly what he thought about her, if he thought anything at all. While she'd been raised by the warriors of her tribe, she was less used to being around the professional soldier types, foreigners all of them, who populated Seiran Mountain. She was well aware of how, back in Nerima, she had obtained a reputation as a somewhat comical Chinese _gaijin_, with no sophistication or redeeming qualities besides her physical beauty. Things would be different here, she hoped. Here, she didn't have problems with the language, and here (in a base full of skilled people of so many nationalities) she didn't feel like the sore thumb who stuck out all the time.

If anyone doubted her here, it would be because she was so young.

But time would prove those people wrong. She was the finest warrior of her generation from a village with a warrior history dating back three thousand years. She was her Great Grandmother's heir, and she was determined to prove her worth in that respect by avenging the wrongs committed on the Tribe by the space borne devils that had killed their Matriarch.

"Kijin Raishu Dan!"

A crescent shape flashed through the air, hitting a target at the fifty-meter mark, shaking it slightly. She saw Ryu himself now, devoid of ear protection, and wearing only a pair of green and brown cargo pants and a black sleeveless muscle shirt. She had seen the ensemble before: it was what he wore when he did his martial arts training, presumably because it was easier to practice the "Demon God Assault Bomb" without anything on your arms.

"Kijin Raishu Dan!" He yelled again, this time snapping his left arm forward and back in a blur of motion, pure speed, and _ki_. Another crescent shaped attack shot through the air, hissing like an angry snake, but unlike its predecessor this one missed the target and hit the wall behind it. Both were constructed of alien alloys, well able to stand up to punishment.

"Damn…" Ryu said between breaths, his work taking a toll on his stamina. He worked the stiffness out of his neck with his right hand, and finally took notice of her.

"Hey," he offered.

"Interesting attack," Shampoo replied, sticking to English. She smiled that he had made the expression in that language. He had obviously picked up on how she preferred it to her imperfect Japanese.

"Thanks. I still have a little trouble with this left arm, though," he spoke in a comfortable manner, considering they didn't really know each other. Shampoo suspected, however, that Mousse had been active enough telling his friends about the 'love of his life, Shampoo.'

"Is that your strongest attack?" She then asked, selecting a target type for herself from the automatic menu. There were ones in the shapes of different sorts of aliens, in addition to the more basic cross or 'bull's eye' circle. All were effectively indestructible to most forms of weaponry, so rather than record holes made in it, a computer detected where it had been struck and recorded it on a small digital display.

"The Yamasenken actually has two more powerful techniques," he explained, but didn't say what they were exactly. Shampoo didn't mind. It was the tendency of martial artists to guard the details of their secret techniques closely. Some would never even admit to their existence, or even say their names, outside of a life or death duel.

Ryu, however, gave her a little info on them when he added, "But they're not as accurate as the Kijin Raishu Dan, and it isn't as if we're being told to level every building with an enemy in it."

He patted his face with a white towel that had hung from a nearby clothing hook.

"What about you?" he asked. "Do you have any ranged special techniques?"

"Not really," she admitted, though she didn't like the fact. "Among the women of my tribe, it is considered more… honorable to focus on close combat techniques."

"Well, that's ok," he replied, with a casual shrug. "After all, I don't think we want to stand around and trade shots at long range with the enemy if we can help it, right? The whole idea is to get close and find an opening."

Shampoo gave him a sideways glance, unsure whether he was just being polite or whether he was being condescending. Taking a deep breath, he seemed content to end the conversation there, and went back to hitting his target downrange. Shampoo took a similar approach, hitting her circular target over and over again with her MSG-90. Ranma was already asking her to practice with heavier weapons, since she was stronger than Konatsu or Ukyou, but none of them were as… elegant as the sniper rifle she had in her hands.

"Kijin Raishu Dan!" She saw, between shots, how one of Ryu's attacks missed again, going over his target's head. She waited a few seconds, and he tried again, this time hitting the target on the neck. Gradually, it became more and more obvious Ryu was only aiming at the upper body. The digital marksmanship display confirmed this fact, and as he finally wound down and got ready to leave, she decided to ask him about it.

"Aiming high?" He'd asked, a little bemused by the question when she had gotten around to posing it. "Look at the target."

Shampoo did, and then back at the marksmanship record that she could hear being printed out next to the main computer console that serviced the firing range's systems. Ryu walked a short way to retrieve it, and by the time he got back to pick up his duffel bag, she still hadn't caught what he meant.

"What do you mean, look at the target?" Shampoo asked, growing a little testy at his answer from before.

"I mean, the target is a Floater type," Ryu said, and held up the hit/miss marksmanship paper, which showed the target he'd used, where he'd hit it and when, and even when he'd missed and hit the wall. The target itself was in the shape of one of the aliens called "Floaters" – the round legless bulb below the torso made it obvious.

"Most of a Floater's body, the abdomen area and up to most of the upper torso is made up of machine parts. It doesn't have any vulnerable organs except those in the head." He saw she still didn't quite get it. "In other words, most of its body is made of the same stuff as that target down range: alien alloys. It's basically a sort of body armor. Unless you hit it in a vulnerable area, chances are that you won't do any damage, so you should aim for the head, for a kill, or the arms, to incapacitate it."

Shampoo nodded her head, seeing that Ryu had really done his research. More than she had, really. She'd read about the Floaters, and how most of their body had been replaced – effectively encased – in a shell of metal. It hadn't occurred to her, however, that it wasn't something that could be punched through. The concept still took some getting used to, as used to breaking anything she could get her petite hands on as she was.

Eventually he headed out, and as he walked away, Shampoo switched targets, and started aiming high. She also decided that starting to practice with a bigger gun was something better done sooner, rather than later.

"Stupid aliens," she grumbled, missing the target downrange.


	21. Take Me to War III

Journal Entry: November 5

I just had a strange dream about Great Grandmother, and getting cursed again at Jyusenkyou. The Guide was there, and so was his daughter, and they pushed me into another pool. I'm writing this right after getting up, because I know I'll forget it later. This is the first bad dream I think I've had since I came here.

This morning we all went and got our own suits of armor: the Personal Armor called the "PA-3 Personal Armor System for Ground Troops." Everyone is supposed to be responsible for taking care of their armor and putting it on, and I expect we will do a lot of training in it. I don't really like the color or the design, but women of the Amazon Tribe are used to wearing armor to protect themselves in battle. This is no different.

Ranma told us to train together today, so that we can learn from each other. What that means is that he hopes spatula girl and her weird boyfriend will learn something useful from their betters. I play-fought with both of them, and Ranma, and Ukyou is still as annoying as I remember to fight. We did our training outside near the base, and when I cooked some delicious lunchtime ramen for Ranma, Ukyou tried to interrupt by stuffing her so-called food down his throat.

When I tried to stop her from molesting the man I am, by the laws of the Chinese Amazon Tribe, already all but married to, she threw exploding okonomiyaki at me! So I decided to teach her a lesson, and used the Kinbaku Chao Mien attack on her. A normal person would have learned their lesson, but not stupid spatula girl! Only a little while later, we turned in for the day. I don't know what Ranma and Ukyou's pet ninja boy did, now that I think about it.

* * *

Ranma watched Konatsu carefully for the other boy's attack. It didn't help that there were currently six identical versions of the genius ninja, courtesy of the special _Kunoichi Ninpou: Rokubu Ichitai_ – meaning 'Six Parts as One Body.' This was a form of multiple body technique, long famed to be one of the pinnacles of the art of the ninja. The six copies set themselves in place, and Ranma flexed his fingers, knuckles popping. 

"Tempuradan!" An explosion sent a cloud of smoke into the air… a hundred feet away. A second later, there was another explosion, and then several small ones.

"Stupid spatula girl as blind as Mousse! No can hit even own restaurant from the inside!"

"That was just a warning shot! Try this on for size: Okonomiyakidan!"

More explosions.

"Maybe we should move?" Ranma asked, glancing towards the growing conflagration the two girls were kicking up. Konatsu, however, had already pulled a disappearing trick and was nowhere to be seen. No more than a second later, a flying disk of surprisingly explosive batter and toppings hit the ground at his feet and blew sky high, sending him tumbling through the air, arms and legs akimbo.

As the pigtailed boy landed in a thicket of bushes, his haunting call echoed through the woods.

"Whhhhyyyy meeeee?"

* * *

Journal Entry: November 6

I applied for permission to train with the Mk.47 Striker 40, and was allowed to use one of the weapons under supervision. As of today, I am now certified to use it for practice, and hopefully, I will be able to use one by the time we have our mission. It is not very heavy and I have no problems carrying it around, even though it is kind of bulky, and so is the ammunition for it. It will take some time to get used to using the special sights on it, though.

Today, we trained with the lost boy's team, all of us together. We went over some strategies for approaching a building when under fire, and a bunch of other things. Outside, they drew an outline in the dirt of the first level of the ship, and we practiced moving through it. Today must have been some kind of 'team day' because we did everything as a group. It was strange.

I caught Mousse staring at me, of course, so I hit some sense into his thick head. Doesn't he realize I'm betrothed to Ranma, who is a much stronger, better groom than he could ever be? He should be happy and help me, not always get in the way. I know he thinks Ranma will marry that ugly tomboy Akane, but I swear that will never happen so long as I am an Amazon and I draw breath.

Anyway, after a while, we went to the new Dojo that the Tendo family built for more play fighting. Except we did it in our personal armor, which was a good idea. There were two matches going on at any time, in the two Dojo rooms, but they dragged on a long time. The armor made it much harder to knock out my opponent, and that was true for everyone, even Ranma. Almost everyone got the chance to fight everyone else once, except Ranma and the lost boy, who didn't fight. Which was too bad. Ranma always wins, but at least the fight is always interesting.

Stick boy Kuno used a real sword today again, and when he said something about taking me out on a date if I win, I made sure to draw with him. At least his crazy sister isn't around anymore. Still I don't want to have someone like that bothering me all the time. I don't know how anyone can stand him.

* * *

Nabiki smirked at the exultant expression on his face.

"That'll be 20,000 yen, Kuno-baby," she said, coyly, holding the photographs out of his reach, but at just enough of an angle that he could see then top one, and parts of a few others.

"Tendo Nabiki, you wound me with your inflated prices!" Kuno clutched his chest, as if fighting a terrible internal war between giving money to such a mercenary girl and going without new pictures.

"Oh?" The middle Tendo smiled like a predatory cat. "I object to you calling my prices inflated. This is simply supply and demand."

"But…" Kuno pleaded, his expression now dour. "I am the only one who buys these things from you, as far as I know."

"And how far do you know?" Nabiki asked, and then added. "Besides, these may well be the last pictures of the pig tailed girl you'll ever be able to have, Kuno-baby. Don't you want something to remember her by? Don't you want something to warm those lonely nights here in this isolated little base underground? Don't you want something to blow up to poster size and pin on your wall, for only an additional 10,000 yen?"

"Avaricious woman," Kuno grumbled, relenting. "How should I transfer such an exorbitant amount of money?"

"Remember where we are, Kuno-baby. I work in the finance department, after all!" Nabiki chuckled cutely, mostly at having swindled the poor swordsman out of hundreds of American dollars to her own benefit. Cash was mostly useless on the base, so she would have to transfer the money from his account to hers electronically. Not that she minded. She liked the feel of yen, be it coin or bill form, but she wasn't married to the tactile sensation. Just the idea, the knowledge, of having more money brought her a nice little rush.

She'd never really cared much for math, or anything of the sort. But sums, the movement and flow of money (preferably into her coffers, and from there, doled out in exchange for the finer things in life), were her obsession. Nabiki Tendo loved money. And she loved buying things with it, and finding the best possible price for what she wanted. Yes: it was that delicate combination, that tight rope act, of paying as little as possible for as much as possible, that truly enthralled her. It was, in a way, her martial art.

Not that she was about to do anything illegal for it. She was only an intern at the moment, watched closely (mostly for incompetence), and spending her time at a desk. Still, it was amusing enough watching and checking the sheer volume of money that went through the coffers of UNETCO just in Japan. Besides, she had a feeling that if she actually tried laundering money or anything else illegal, she'd get caught in less than a day, and probably be executed for 'crimes against humanity' or something.

UNETCO, despite having quite deep pockets, took its finances very seriously.

"Here you go, Kuno-baby," Nabiki said, after happily loading up a screen asking for a login, password and PIN number. "Just sign in, load up a transfer of finances form, and send it. It handles money in American dollars, but I know the going exchange rate."

Of course, she'd known the rate beforehand, and intended to round up generously when she gave him the estimate. Kuno sighed, and she scooted over in her chair to let him have access to the keyboard. His hands wavered over the keys, and he looked at her critically.

"A little privacy?"

"Oh, of course. I'll just go get a drink of water," Nabiki said, her voice dripping innocence as she got out of her chair, and headed towards the water cooler. She heard Kuno typing once she was unable to see him, and she shrugged at the missed opportunity. Nothing illegal, she reminded herself. The true contest wasn't in robbing people, but in tricking them, beating them at haggling, and getting them to hand over their money consensually. It was a contest of intellect and will!

At the water cooler, she filled up two little paper cups, and in the middle of the second, she saw someone approach. She recognized her immediately: one of her new coworkers. Nabiki, being an intern, sat at the lowest and least important rung of the current non-combat population on the base. Even Kasumi, as a nurse in training, probably ranked higher in people's eyes. All of the personnel in the base were extremely skilled with exceptional backgrounds, and so they were rightly proud of themselves, and naturally a little aloof to the new girl who got in without a college degree.

But if Nabiki Tendo had the distinct honor of being at the bottom of the current pecking order, Sun-Yu Kim was only a step above her. The spunky girl reminded Nabiki a little of Akane; she even had hair the same blue-black color, but grown long just past her shoulders and without Akane's bangs. Sun-Yu was a new addition to the program here, having earned her degree in America, at the UNETCO Sanctuary Community. Her father had joined XCOM in 2001, and his family had been transferred to the Community. Five years later, she had gotten the chance to work at the same base as her father, and she'd been shipped over.

Supposedly, she had a younger brother who wanted to join up too, much to their mother's exasperation. He was only fifteen, however, and barring him learning powerful and esoteric martial arts, it was highly unlikely he'd see combat with the alien menace. Unless, of course, the war dragged on and on, or UNETCO became overwhelmed and the human race found itself helpless and under siege…

"Who's the cute guy by your desk?" Sun-Yu asked, walking up with her own empty paper cup. She spoke in English like everyone did at work. Nabiki had considered herself capable with the language after her graduation (she'd even done well in college, when she took it), but just a few hours under the influence of the pedagogical interface, she found herself speaking and understanding it fluently. Reading English was a little more difficult, and writing a bit harder, but it was more than enough to get the job done.

"You mean Kuno?" Nabiki knew she girl meant Kuno, but it was fun to play around. There was always potential profit to be made in people's romantic interests, or even their base lusts.

'Oh my,' Nabiki's inner Kasumi mused. 'That made me sound like a pimp.'

"Kuno, huh?" Sun-Yu noted the two cups Nabiki held, as she refilled her own at the water cooler. "Are you and he…?" She let the sentence trail, leaving it implied.

"Not quite my type, I'm afraid," Nabiki admitted, and it was the truth. Kuno was sort of cute (actually, he could be quite handsome when he wasn't acting like a pretentious fool), but he wasn't terribly _interesting_. Plus, he got on her nerves more often than he didn't. His money, on the other hand – there was something she could spend the rest of her life with!

"He's just a friend. We've known each other since elementary school," Nabiki continued, and waggled her eyebrows suggestively. "He's one of the new martial artists on the base. I can get you a picture or two, if you want…"

"Why would I want his picture?" she other girl asked, though she did lean to her side to get a better look at Kuno, who had a sorrowful look on account of his now smaller… account. I wouldn't mind meeting him though."

Nabiki didn't let the disappointment of making a few easy bucks deter her. If she could somehow foist Kuno off on Sun-Yu (or even just distract him a little while with the more worldly young woman), she could not only try and make some money off their relationship by selling information, but also get a little from Akane for getting the irritating kendoist off her back as well.

"Drop in on us in a few minutes; I'll introduce you," Nabiki replied, and winked. "Kuno's something of a lady's man. You'll like him."

'For a little while,' she thought, but didn't say.

Heading back to her desk, Nabiki handed Kuno the drink she'd gotten him, and sat on the corner of her desk before crossing her long legs and smoothing over her short black skirt. It was such a shame that he was essentially impervious to any of her attempts at seduction, or even just throwing him off base with her looks. After years of being swindled, he'd developed an effective immunity. Still, it was best to keep in practice.

She didn't bother to check to make sure Kuno had filled in the right amount of money. He'd never try to cheat her, and he'd never go back on a deal or his word. She could respect the position. She had no qualms about omitting truths herself, or even stretching them, but it was usually best to cultivate at least the appearance of honesty.

"Now, Kuno-baby…" She smiled at him. "Let's talk about buying an equal number of Akane's pictures at the same price…"

"What?" Kuno gasped. "Curse your greed, woman! How dare you ask the noble scion of House Kuno to pay, not once, but twice, such an outrageous sum for photographs? While it cannot be denied that the preserved image of the beauteous Akane Tendo is worth parting with money for, how can you justify charging as much for them as the – in your own words 'rare' and 'limited edition' – pictures of the pigtailed girl?"

"But think what it would mean to my sister if you paid less for her pictures than you did for the pigtailed girl?" Nabiki leaned over a little and looked at him seriously. "Why, it would be an insult! Are you saying you love the pigtailed girl more than Akane?"

"I… I…" Kuno clenched his right fist and stared up at the heavens (or rather: at a light built into the ceiling).

"I must have them BOTH!" He vowed, thunder rumbling in the heavens and waves crashing dramatically against the shore (inside his mind). "Curse my heart, generous and bountiful enough for two such spirited ladies as it is! For each, my love flows equally and eternally!"

Nabiki just grinned, broadly. "I knew you'd see things my way…"

* * *

Journal Entry: November 7

Had another strange dream last night. Not really bad. It was about the date Ukyou had with Ranma tonight. Tuesday, Ranma said he plans to invite Ukyou over to eat with his family, just like I get to be with him Thursday. Wednesday, he eats over with the Tendo family and the violent girl they want to shackle him to. Now I can barely remember the dream, but it had something to do with Ukyou buying Ranma from his father with food I think. I know it wouldn't work in real life (probably), but it was still scary.

The only unusual thing today was when we went to the morgue to look at alien bodies. Ranma called it a Field Trip. We all had to touch the bodies, to make them seem less mysterious and more real, or something like that. Most of them felt and smelled like spoiled fish and cabbage. It did help to show where some of the weak spots on their bodies are, at least, so the trip wasn't a total waste of time.

I visited one of the workshops today, too, and saw Mousse there. Not that I care what he does, but I was sort of curious, so I asked. After the fool stopped being happy that I'd even bothered to talk to him, he explained that he was customizing his personal armor to make it easier for him to use his Hidden Weapons black magic. I'd forgotten about that, and so I've looked into adding some personal touches to my armor, too.

* * *

Mousse chuckled darkly as he worked.

None of the technicians or engineers in the workshop really understood the purpose of Mousse's modifications to his personal armor, or the fact that he was tailoring an overcoat for it. That was all right – they didn't have to understand the mysteries of his Art. They just had to help him, and to his relief, they were happy to do just that.

XCOM had the most state of the art fabrication and construction machines he'd ever heard of. In fact, there were a lot of machines he'd never heard of, but like those who worked here didn't question him; he didn't question how they did what they did either. Things had come along perfectly, in the end. He'd have to be much more economical with his use of Hidden Weapons than in the past, but the result would be a leaner, deadlier Art.

As his new personal armor took form, and developing from a few thoughts and rough sketches, he smiled and adjusted his thick work goggles. He had a whole slew of new ideas for techniques, a generation evolved from the Hidden Weapons Art he'd learned all those years ago. It would be another day before he was done, but when he was…

"Even the Junyoken is not outside the realm of possibility…"

* * *

Journal Entry: November 8 

Not much to say.

I practiced more with the Striker 40. We trained together as a group again today, first with weapons and tactics, then with martial arts. The stupid violent girl tried to help, but only got in the way. When Ranma pointed this out to her, she hit him with a training sword. Good. Every time she hits him, it means they are less likely to get together. I don't know why Ranma bothers with that brick headed girl anyway. Even Ukyou is better than her.

We ate at the commissary inside the base, and they served this sort of wonton. It was some kind of American wonton I think. For some reason, I don't know the name of it off the top of my head like I know most English words. I didn't say as much, but it was actually surprisingly good.

The rest of our training time we spent at a Psionics Lab, working on our _ki_. There was a movie we watched about building "Ego Barriers" and other stuff. There were a lot of fancy words, but basically what it was about was to defend yourself from an aura attack. I wish Great grandmother were here. She could teach how to do that much better than doctors and machines.

We were also tested for our "Psionic Strength" and "Psionic Skill" and shown a "PsiAmp." Supposedly, with it, you can directly influence someone's mind, even if you can't see them. You can even take over their minds completely.

We mostly just worked on our auras, and internalizing and externalizing _ki_. I've never been very good at externalizing _ki_, but at least Ukyou and Mousse have the same problem. I also want to point out the funniest thing that happened today! At some point, Ukyou tried to have some kind of private conversation with Ryouga. I don't know what the spatula head said (probably she tried to talk him into some stupid scheme of hers) but I don't think it had the desired effect!

* * *

Ukyou saw him standing against a wall, watching the others practice. Clothes aside, the grumpy expression on his face alone gave off who he was, wherever he was. Taking a break from practicing 'pushing out her emotions' and 'visualizing her spirit' (whatever that meant) she leaned against the wall next to him, ostensibly to rest a bit. There were no chairs in the room, with its white tiles all over the floor, walls and ceiling.

He looked at her briefly, as if just to register her presence, and then went back to gauging the progress of the others. Ukyou pouted and frowned, miffed by the dismissing gesture. Especially since she was willing to give him another chance to help her break up Akane and Ranma. She knew the lost boy still had feelings for the youngest Tendo girl, and since he hadn't brought his farmer girlfriend with him, it was likely that he'd begin to fall back on his first love. Ukyou knew all too well that her real competition for Ranma's hand wasn't Shampoo, it was Akane, and her best card for wooing Akane away from her Ran-chan was Ryouga Hibiki.

"So, how are we doing?" She asked, hoping to warm up his conversation a bit.

He tilted his head to look at her in profile.

"Poorly," he answered.

"That's a little harsh," Ukyou replied, put off by the response. Poorly?

"This is probably the most important training you'll ever have," he answered, and he closed his eyes and grimaced, as if tasting something sour. "There are creatures we will have to face, have to fight… that will tear your mind open, Ukyou. And those are the merciful ones. The cruel ones… will let you live. Live and wish you'd died."

His words sent a chill down her spine. She was used to hearing overly dramatic sorts of speech from him, hell: he'd even quietly quoted poetry a few times while musing over his unrequited affections. But there was a hollow monotone, a statement of simple fact, in what he had just said. Still, she didn't let it deter her. She knew he took this fight against the aliens seriously.

"You wanted us to do the best we can, and train as hard as we can," Ukyou reminded him, standing up straighter against the wall adjacent to him. "That's what we're doing. One hundred percent."

He didn't reply immediately, but eventually nodded slowly. "How about you, Ukyou? Do you need any help, or…?"

"Actually," she said, and smiled at the opening in the conversation he'd provided. "I do need your help!"

"Really?" he asked, his voice (while not the equal of her chipper tone) did indicate he was feeling a bit more amenable. "Well: just ask."

"Well, I noticed you're all alone here…" She did note the look in his eyes, as his pupils grew smaller, but she pushed on. His reaction reinforced her guess that Akari had dumped him, probably getting tired of him getting lost.

"I'm guessing you're still a bachelor, right?" she asked, but kept talking before he could answer. "And I'm also guessing you've been thinking about Akane again, right?"

"Not interested," he quickly said, and looked away, turning his attention back to the gathering _ki_s in the room.

"You didn't even hear me out!" Ukyou complained, grabbing the sleeve of his shirt. "Listen, Hibiki, this is our chance! Ranma isn't even living with the Tendo's anymore, and you're around all the time now! With me being on Ran-chan's team, I'm with him more often than he's around Akane…"

"Ukyou…" he growled a warning.

"Think about it! Are you a man or aren't you?" Ukyou, growing more annoyed by the fact that he wasn't even looking at her, grabbed him by the front of his shirt below the collar, and tried to force him to face her. "Don't be so wishy washy! Be decisive! Seize the moment! If you'd stuck with your guns a year ago, you'd probably be happily engaged, and I'd already be married!"

"Ranma and Akane have my blessing," he told her firmly, and she drew back a little. At the failed wedding, she'd suspected that he'd just given up.

"You're lying," she said, calling his bluff. "You still love Akane."

"Of course I do," he replied, keeping his voice low, almost a whisper. "I will always care for her. But she wants Ranma. Not me."

"You're just afraid," Ukyou hissed. "A real man would fight for the woman he loves!"

The moment she said it, she knew she'd crossed a line, even if she didn't know why. For days now, she'd known how on edge Ryouga had been, but eventually it had sort of faded into the background noise and been forgotten or overlooked. Now, suddenly, she felt it sweep over her: a cold, icy grip that caught her breath in her throat.

Partly, she knew on an analytical level, it was her _Sakkijutsu_ – her danger sense as a high-class martial artist – interacting with his aura, his emotions, his state of mind, and his **Intent**. _Sakkijutsu_ made one very sensitive to such things, providing an incredible combat edge, but also a great vulnerability. Without a shadow of a doubt, she knew that if he wanted to, that if he acted on that sudden tidal wave of repressed anger and depression and despair that she had called up, that he would be able to kill her in a heartbeat.

It could have been as simple as a finger poked straight through her forehead and into her brain, a snake strike that cut through muscle and bone and impaled her heart, or even a _ki_ attack that would shear and burn the flesh from her bones. No one, even Ranma, would be able to move fast enough to save her. Not just in spite of years of training, but _because of it_, she froze in fear, a dear caught in the paralyzing gaze of his headlights.

It lasted only as long as a lingering thought, and then it was gone.

She stumbled back, no longer frozen in place, but still having lost her sense of balance. Her face was ashen, like a ghost, worse: like Gosunkugi. She started to fall, but a hand reached out and caught her, pulled her in, and steadied her. Her heart was racing, her mouth dry, and her mind just barely downshifting from survival mode – fight or flight.

"Ukyou, I'm sorry. Ukyou? Ukyou?"

"L… let me go, please…" she managed, and Ryouga did so. She looked around, and saw everyone staring at them. They'd felt it, too, or a fraction of it anyway. Ranma looked tense, like he'd been in the middle of moving across the room in a single footstep, even though he knew he'd still be a millisecond too late.

"Sorry," he repeated, and bowed his head to the others, as well as her. "Sorry. I… have to step outside for a second."

Ukyou saw him go, but she felt emotionally hollow. His leaving didn't cause relief or sadness or joy or anything. She didn't even feel anything when she saw Ranma next to her, his hand on her arm and a concerned expression on his face.

"Take a break, ok, Ucchan?" He asked, smiling encouragingly, and helped her to sit back down on the tile floor. Slowly, she began to feel again, though her body still felt numb. But even with Ranma close by, she felt bad. How could she have said something to conjure up those feelings, those terrible murderous feelings, in the lost boy?

"He's going to kill someone…" she said hauntingly, looking up at her childhood friend with wide eyes. "He's going to kill someone, Ran-chan."

And, worse, Ranma didn't even try and tell her she was wrong.

* * *

Journal Entry: November 9

I had a dream about Great grandmother again. It wasn't a nightmare, though. We were training, and talking, and I was fourteen or fifteen and hadn't met Ranma yet. I don't remember exactly what we were talking about, but it was important. I think she was trying to tell me that because I don't have the curse anymore I don't have an excuse to not bring back Ranma for the Tribe. Maybe she appeared because I was going to be visiting and eating with Ranma tonight again.

Or maybe she appeared as a warning.

Who knows if dreams mean anything really? You probably want to hear about what happened after I woke up. November 9 was the day we had all been training for…

* * *

Shampoo shot out of bed, still clutching the sheets to her body.

"Alert! Alert!" The recorded voice came from a hidden speaker somewhere in her room, keyed to the communications grid. "Priority One Message! Assemble and report to duty station immediately! Code Three is in Effect!"

It was time.


	22. Operation Zebra I

The year is 2005. For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. The Nerima Wrecking Crew and their families have been relocated to Seiran Mountain, XCOM headquarters for the Far East. Finally, a mission is sent down for the newly militarized Nerima Wrecking Crew, to cut their teeth against the Alien Menace. Now, Operation Zebra unfolds amid the formerly quiet fields of a remote farm.

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia**  
Chapter VIII  
_Operation Zebra_

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

The ship was a ghost: a sensor anomaly that went unidentified on the screens of the national radar grid. They were a blip that registered for a second, along an impossible vector, and then mysteriously disappeared. They were a dark shape against a dark sky, moving without a sound in excess of the speed of sound, no boom or roar informing the sleeping world below of their presence. Anyone by chance looking up as they passed overhead would see less than the silhouette of a circular shape just above the tree line. 

It was one of the Lightning class; the first UNETCO design to incorporate the superior technology of the Enemy, and while fast and deadly, it was prized for its covert nature. Indeed, it was an alien ship in all but name, built of alien materials and using alien technologies, and even equipped with an alien weapon. However, it was built by human hands, and piloted by a human mind. If anything, this made it more dangerous than otherwise.

"Ranma… this is all your fault. You know that, right?"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've only said it like three times already… Damnit, now I lost my page!"

Ryouga groaned and shook his head. Despite the common misconception, it really wasn't that often that he blamed Ranma for problems, usually restricting his complaints to the Big Four: missing the duel, stealing his bread (repeatedly), ruining his chances of getting together with Akane, and being directly responsible for his horrible Jyusenkyou curse. How the rumor ("You blame everything on Ran-chan, she had said, on what basis he couldn't imagine) that he considered Ranma the source of **all** his problems began he couldn't imagine. Ranma was the source of **most **of his major problems. That was all. Or that had been all.

Both team leaders were hunched over a small tank robot, called a 'Heavy Weapons Platform.' It was a well-armored and heavily armed little machine, only as tall as a man's waist but more than three meters wide and long. All terrain capable, it was designed to provide a mobile defensive fighting position in a mission, and be able to contribute significant firepower as well. It could be used as a form of cover to advance behind, or it could be used to try and pin down or distract the enemy.

Unfortunately, neither of them had bothered to learn to use it.

"You said you'd read the manual!" Ryouga barked at his sort-of-friend/mostly-hated-rival.

"I said 'I was reading the manual!' Present tense!" Ranma replied, and the two stared down at the control panel for the HWP. For all its high technology, XCOM had not yet developed an artificial intelligence, and the mini-tank required that its behavior be calibrated beforehand, or that it be operated manually, or both.

"They call this 'user friendly?'" The pigtailed one shook his head at the exposed controls on the back of the HWP, revealed by sliding back an armored plate. The hand held controller wasn't any better looking.

"You're the one with the Playstation," Ryouga commented, frowning at the increasing probability that they'd have to do the mission without the support of the tank.

"Does this look like a Playstation controller to you!" Ranma held out a black gauntlet that looked something like a powerglove on steroids.

Ryouga just shrugged.

"Forget it!" Ranma gave up; exasperated by the HWP and the two hundred page manual they were trying to race through and 'get the gist of.' "We'll just do the mission without it."

"Looks like we don't have a choice," Ryouga agreed. He could understand how busy his counterpart had been, because he was in the same situation, but Ranma had boasted that he'd learn how to do it, and then had put it off. Now it was too late. Still, hopefully it wouldn't matter. Besides, they weren't just an ordinary team, and they weren't trained for a firefight, which was what the HWP was built to support. Their successes hinged entirely on being able to close to within twenty, or at least fifty, meters of the enemy, and make use of their martial arts training.

Looking at Ranma, Ryouga could tell that the other boy was thinking the same thing. The HWP would have been nice, if only to have something to hide behind that wouldn't be instantly disintegrated by alien weaponry, but they'd do without. He looked around the large passenger compartment that was, essentially, the entire internal volume of the man made flying saucer they were flying in. Even the pilot sat in a chair in the room, there not being a separate cockpit, navigating the craft through a psionic interface based on that he'd seen on the alien ship just a few weeks ago.

There was no inertia inside the ship, no sense of acceleration or movement in comparison to the outside world. From the moment they'd entered it, they hadn't felt so much as a slight lurch or a hint of choppiness. It was convenient, in that no one needed to be strapped down or otherwise restrained. From take off to landing, they could walk around, get their equipment ready, or even read and review information pertinent to the mission.

Ryouga saw that most of the former Nerima Wrecking Crew were busy making sure their weapons and personal armor were in working order. He could feel the anxiety in the air, mixed with an eagerness to get into combat, where they were all much more at home. Shampoo and Mousse were standing close to each other, and seeing them that way reminded the lost boy of how they'd appeared to help Ranma and himself against Pantyhose Taro after the jerk had kidnapped Akane. Regardless of their motives, they'd found some comfort and familiarity in each other's presence in the prelude to battle.

Kuno and Ryu were sitting in small flip out seats built into the walls, psyching themselves up. Ryouga went over to check on their moods, and Ryu greeted him with a nod. The poverty stricken Kumon heir had a determined look to his eyes, and a professional demeanor. They didn't exchange words; a simple nod said more than enough. Kuno looked obviously eager to prove himself, and as he got close, Ryouga saw that the master kendoist held two pictures cupped in his right hand.

"Kuno," Ryouga said, standing at the edge of the older boy's personal space.

"Hibiki," Kuno's tone wasn't especially respectful, even to someone who was technically his superior officer. The lost boy didn't care too much about that. All he had ever asked of the swordsman and wannabe samurai was that he took orders, and fought and killed the enemy. Years of being captain of the Furinkan kendo squad meant that at least Kuno understood what it meant to be part of a team, and to have a team based mentality, even if he wasn't at the head of things.

Not surprisingly, the two pictures were of Akane Tendo and the 'mysterious pigtailed girl.' Ryouga didn't linger too long wondering if Kuno actually 'loved' the two girls he hardly even knew. For a while, he'd been torn between Akari and Akane, himself, but he liked to think he'd gotten to know them better than Kuno knew either of his 'loves.' And again, it didn't matter anymore. The only thing that mattered…

He clenched his fists till his knuckles burned white.

Strapping on the torso part of his personal armor, Ryouga observed the rest of Ranma's group. Ranma and Konatsu were working out what they'd do right after landing; Shampoo was still with Mousse, a little curious about why he was wearing robes over his PASGT. And Ukyou… she sat by herself, watching Ranma and Konatsu, only wearing the boots and leg sections of her armor.

He wasn't sure why he walked over to her, or why he placed his gauntleted hand on her slender shoulder. The PASGT was, on the inside, like a body glove, so they all wore very light clothes under it. In fact, his mentor had told him that most XCOM soldiers only wore their underwear under the armor. Ukyou, like Shampoo, wore a white cotton undershirt to preserve a little more of her dignity. She'd always been a very attractive girl, (well, when she didn't dress like a boy) but that wasn't why he'd worked with her before. It wasn't even as if her plans had been that great.

Maybe it was because he recognized her loneliness.

Her isolation.

Her desperation.

Maybe it was because he had known, almost from the beginning, that she was doomed to failure. He'd liked to tell himself, that first year, that Akane hadn't liked Ranma in the least. She certainly didn't behave like she had strong feelings for him, but when push came to shove; she was always there, calling out his name. And Ranma, damn him, had always been there to protect and save the girl he'd most wanted. Damn them both for pretending to hate each other, and for giving false hope to those who would have been better off without it.

'If you'd found him first, Ukyou…' he almost wanted to say, but didn't. She wouldn't want to hear it, wouldn't like the defeatist tone; wouldn't appreciate how it placed the blame on her. But she **had **been late. Too late.

Ukyou looked up at him, briefly searching his features, before looking back down at the torso section of the armor that lay between her feet.

"What do you want, Ryouga?" she asked, just then. She didn't sound glad to see him, to have him near her, and he didn't blame her for that after how he'd scared her the day before. At the same time, he had a feeling that she wanted someone to stand next to her, to be near her as they sped towards what was likely the most dangerous fight of their lives. Ukyou didn't want to be alone, but she was. Even when he'd found acceptance and affection in the arms of Akari, Ukyou had lived with Konatsu, together but alone with someone she didn't love.

"We're miserable creatures, aren't we?" He asked quietly.

"You and me?" she asked in reply. "Or the entire human race?"

He gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze.

"Put your armor on, Ukyou," he said, somberly. "We're almost there."

He'd wanted to say any number of things to her just then, give all manner of advice, but he knew she wouldn't have reacted well to it. She never did. She didn't like how he thought, she didn't like his observations, and she didn't really trust him. Not anymore. They weren't friends, they never had been, but they understood each other, and he stood by her side while she dressed for war.

Flipping back her hair, Ukyou lowered her helmet over her face, and in the place of a lonely and unsure young woman stood a grim, faceless soldier of UNETCO, sworn to fight and die in defense of humanity. That version of her he could deal with more easily. Putting on his own helmet, he saw the others standing around in much the same state.

Some were easier to distinguish than others. The personal armor was unisex, but Shampoo, like Ukyou, had an obviously feminine figure for the uniform to conform to. Mousse wore black robes over his armor, Kuno had his sword strapped to his waist, and Ryu had the kanji for 'good fortune' emblazoned on his helmet. Ryouga finished tying the last bandanna to his left and right arm, and he too was ready.

"We'll be using channel 45.321.90," Ranma said, and then promptly activated his external audio muffler. The others quickly keyed to the right communications channel, where they could talk freely without being overheard. Making sure their individual weapons were in place, standing around and waiting, they never noticed when the ship landed.

"This is your Captain speaking," the one unfamiliar voice on the ship spoke up, and all those assembled looked up from what they were doing in his direction. "We have touched down. No enemy fire to report. Target is just under one mile to the north, next to a two story farmhouse."

The sound of rifles being loaded suddenly seemed all the louder.

"I am activating my team's individual Black Boxes… now," Ryouga said, breaking the brief silence. "This is India Squad. Commencing Operation Zebra."

"Same here," Ranma added just a second later. "Black Boxes are all active. Juliet Squad reporting – Operation Zebra is underway."

* * *

Nabiki had read or heard somewhere that six in the morning was, statistically speaking, the best time to see a UFO in July. She must have heard that mentioned off hand in the news or something, but she'd forgotten about it until now. It was half past five, and the reason she was still awake wasn't to glimpse an unidentified flying object, but to wait and see if her friends and associates came back from taking one out of the air, permanently. 

They hadn't been told of the mission, of course.

But the fact that they'd all been training especially hard, that they'd had a more palatable sense of urgency to their words and actions, and now that they were all suddenly missing in the middle of the night… it didn't take a genius to guess that they were off doing their new job. Ranma had gone to fight many times, and against some truly dangerous opponents (like the Musk and the Phoenix Tribe), but this was different. This was truly a life or death battle. Hell, it wasn't some martial arts duel or battle, it was war: dirty and merciless and terrifying.

They were all awake, up and waiting, since the Saotomes had come over and told them that Ranma was gone. How they'd even known that he'd left, Nabiki wasn't sure. Nodoka had claimed that she'd had a bad premonition as she went to sleep, and that when she'd opened the door to Ranma's apartment, he'd been gone. She'd probably then tried to call Ryouga, or maybe Ukyou or Shampoo, and when those leads never developed, she'd called the Tendo family to check in.

'No, Auntie Saotome, your son is not over here having a midnight tryst with my little sister,' Nabiki thought with a smirk, but it faded when she saw the fretting state the older woman was in. She'd been quiet since coming over, sitting with Kasumi at the table in what passed for their living room, occasionally sipping her coffee to stay awake with a fresh injection of caffeine. Akane was in her room across the hall, and like Nabiki, checking her email client every few minutes for news.

The last time there had been an alert, and an "interception," they had gotten a curt email about it, indicating that it had been a success. With no clearance, they really couldn't expect more than that, but it was a little lifeline to what was happening that they clung to regardless. Genma and Nabiki's father seemed to be taking it in relative stride, and the two had taken to a game of shogi to pass the time.

Nabiki sighed, and poured herself a fresh cup of rich, dark coffee. Blowing on it, she ducked over into Kasumi's kitchen to dip an ice cube into the liquid. She really wasn't in the mood to let it cool naturally, and retrieving what she needed, she popped the little cube in and leaned against a nearby counter. Kasumi kept her place neat and homey, and Nabiki recognized a few things her sister had had delivered from their old home.

The Tendo sisters all had apartments to themselves, finally, but they still crossed the hall (or in her case, walked halfway down the hall) to have dinner like a family in Kasumi's place. Her father had it easy: he was right next-door. It was a nice little reprieve Nabiki wished she'd been able to enjoy back in college. It was like the benefits of home, and the privacy of living by yourself. Pity it took what it did to bring things about.

Walking out of the kitchen and towards Auntie Saotome and Kasumi, Nabiki sighed loudly. "I don't know why we're even worried about them. Those maniacs are all but invincible. Not to mention that Ranma and Ryouga managed to clear out an alien ship all by themselves before."

The two women looked up at her.

"I'm going back to my room," Nabiki quickly declared, before they could form a response. "You'll all regret staying up instead of going back to sleep when they come back the same as they left."

She took a sip of the cooled down coffee, and turned to leave.

"You didn't thank me for the coffee," Kasumi observed, and Nabiki just knew her older sister was smiling.

"I'm not worried about them," the middle Tendo sister quickly clarified. "I'm just interested in how things work out."

With that Parthian shot, Nabiki left and slowly walked down the hall back to her apartment. She hadn't been lying before; she really wasn't that worried (maybe just a little). But then it wasn't really in her nature to worry about things. Whatever happened, she would react to it as best she could. None of that kept her from hoping everyone came back alive, even Ranma's more annoying and frustrating fiancées. And yes, even Kuno.

"Nothing stops the Nerima Wrecking Crew," she muttered, and actually found herself believing it. Then she remembered what else the Furinkan students had muttered about their unusual peers. "Nothing can kill them… except each other…"

* * *

Konatsu felt his body go weightless, as the gravity lift lowered him to the ground below the parked Lightning class UFO Transport. He crouched low, like he'd practiced, and like he'd worked out beforehand, and quickly scrambled for cover behind one of the ship's landing struts. They were armored like the hull of the ship, and could well soak up enemy fire if they had to. 

The dark crop fields loomed threateningly in the dusk all around them, but they were separated from the alien UFO by a small copse of trees in the form of an orchard. It was pre-dawn still, and the world seemed to have an eerie gloom to it, an unnatural and threatening ambiance that he could feel through his environment insulated armor. Even to a ninja, shadows seemed longer and more foreboding, and in the distance, behind the trees, he could make out a soft and unearthly light just a little too high in the air.

'This is it. This is them,' Konatsu thought, and the feeling from before resurfaced. It was fear. Blinding fear. He'd never felt it as keenly as he had that night in Nerima, when they had came. He'd told Ukyou that he'd fallen back to a better location, but in truth, he'd ran. He couldn't let any of the others know that, but he ran like a coward when he'd had an inkling of what had invaded the district that long silent night.

Ukyou would shun him if she knew, and while Ranma would probably say he 'understood,' Konatsu doubted that he really would. The others he didn't know very well, but he didn't think they'd ever respect him if that fact came to light. And now, despite the building terror inside him, he'd agreed to be the first one of them out to scout the area. What sort of a fool was he, he wondered, to make a commitment he didn't think he could follow through with?

"Konatsu, are you ok?" That was Ranma's voice. How long had he been crouched behind the landing strut?

Gritting his teeth, Konatsu replied, "Fine. Just getting ready."

"Ok. Good luck, man."

And then Ranma's voice left him, and Konatsu was alone in the dark again.

'Everyone's watching. Everyone's waiting!' Konatsu took a deep breath, and clapped his hands together soundlessly. "Kunoichi Ninpou: Rokubu Ichitai!"

For a moment, before his senses acclimated and reoriented themselves, he felt like he had twelve arms, and a dozen feet. The instant after using the technique was the must vulnerable, and one of the secrets to defeating it. Then, it was over, and he felt himself able to shuffle between the 'fake' Konatsus he'd summoned into existence with his _ki_. Not wasting any time, he began to crouch-run towards a small fenced off part of the adjacent field. The other versions of him spread out in other directions, making barely a sound as they slipped into a field of wheat.

The biggest danger at the moment was the orchard. There was sure to be something in it. Finding concealed positions on a hill, behind a ridge, and behind a well-placed tree planted as a windbreaker, he began initial ground reconnaissance. For his 'clones' this meant visual recon, but he could use the electronics and equipment added onto his MSG-90 rifle and integrated into his helmet HUD.

This was the AN/TRS-2 Platoon Advance Warning System or PAWS, consisting of a battery (among other things) of night vision, thermo imaging, audio sensors, pulse Doppler radar, and a special motion detector. Like all XCOM equipment, it was smartlink capable, and patched into the hub on the parked Lightning aircraft. From there, the information could be accessed by anyone in the two combat teams that had been deployed, or even in real time by Command and Control back at Seiran Mountain.

So it wasn't like there was any pressure or anything not to screw up.

It was at that thought, right then, that one of his clones saw something hidden among the trees of the orchard. He quickly ordered it to duck down, and he scanned the area with his PAWS. There was nothing on motion detection, but… yes: with the night vision scope, he could see it. An arm.

"Contact in the orchard, about sixty maybe seventy meters," he said, over the secure frequency. "I see one, a Floater type creature, but there's probably at least two."

"Do they see you?" Ranma asked.

"No," Konatsu replied, feeling the tension in his body ratchet up a notch.

"Do they see the ship?" This was Ryouga's voice.

Konatsu briefly looked behind him, and then went back to fixing his eyes on the alien's vague position. He gulped when he realized what he had to say.

"Yes."

"It's ok. We planned for this," Ranma's voice came back, calm and in control. "I'm coming out."

"We don't know if the Umisenken will work against these creatures," Ryouga replied, addressing the other group leader.

"It's worth a try. Ukyou. Shampoo. You two follow and come out after sixty seconds. Konatsu and I will flush out the sniper in the trees, you two will either advance to support us, or give fire on a highlighted target if we're pinned down. Remember: advance on angles! Like we practiced."

"Right!"

"You got it, Ran-chan!"

Ranma's audio shut off when he stopped speaking or otherwise making noises of a certain volume, and everything became silent again. Konatsu waited, feeling the strain of keeping his copy selves corporeal. He could feel his control stretch, and start to slip, but still no word from Ranma about being in position.

Konatsu was just starting to worry, when a shot rang out.

It hit like a runaway train, right in his gut. It burned, hot like the fires of hell, hot like the surface of the sun; it cut straight through his body and soul leaving only ash behind. For an instant, his heart stopped.

For an instant, he died.

And then it was over. In truth, he hated the multiple body technique, no matter how legendary and impressive it was. He hated it. Konatsu knew which one of his copies had just been shot, and it felt like a piece of him had withered and died with it. Only time would heal the wound in his _ki_, but his memories, and that split second on the border of life and death… that would be with him forever, lurking in the back of his mind like a shadow at his back.

The next few seconds were a frantic blur, as he jumped from one body to the next, moving them, remembering where he was, scurrying like an animal in the middle of the road about to be run over. Where was Ranma? Why didn't he hear anything? Why couldn't he say anything? Where was his voice? He cried out, hoping to hear someone's voice, but it was in one of his fake bodies, and the technique didn't replicate electronics.

"I'm… I'm taking fire!" Konatsu, now in his real body, had to bite back the urge to tell that he'd been hit. It would only make the others panic. But maybe, shouldn't they?

"I'm almost there! Head towards the orchard!" Ranma yelled, and Konatsu and his copies picked up the pace, swooping towards the grove of trees.

Something round and bright flew through the air. It wasn't an alien weapon, that fired green colored plasma, and it wasn't a _ki_ attack. The light pulsed yellow, but only during its most downward arc, and Konatsu realized what it was: an electroflare. The enemy would know they were there, but it would also hopefully blind them, throw them off, and illuminate them.

"I see him!" Shampoo yelled into his ear, though she was by now half a football field away. "I'm taking the shot!"

"Advancing!" Ukyou chimed in.

"Shit!" Ranma cursed.

Konatsu's second clone entered the trees, as did his first. There was another bright light, green and terrible, and another of his selves got hit, but from a different angle. The second alien! He wished he could have heard friendly gunfire, but the MSG-90s were silenced, and he jumped behind a tree. His concentration slipped, and another of his selves dissipated like mist, the _ninpou_ that held it together broken.

This wasn't how things were supposed to go! He peeked behind the tree, and saw the alien – a hint of purple flesh beneath the dark cover of the trees, a flash of bright red eyes. Behind him he heard an inhuman howl, a sound utterly foreign and offensive to the ears of any earth born creature. It hurt even to hear, but at the same time, it was almost heaven sent. It meant that the other alien had been slain or at least wounded.

"Konatsu, where are you?" Ranma yelled, his voice heavy and agitated. "I can't see you!"

"I'm here! Here!" Konatsu ducked, as a barely audible snarl parted the air. A green light splashed against the thick tree behind him, and punched clean through it. He could feel the heat of it even through the insulation of his personal armor. Spinning, acting purely on instinct, he picked up a handful of throwing stars from his belt and unleashed them single handed, seeing his attacker through the burning and blasted crescent cut into the tree. Its tottering form creaked under the strain and began to fall as the metal stars whizzed through the air.

True to his practiced aim, they struck the Floater in what would have been its vital areas… vital if it had been human, anyway. Those that hit the torso simply bounced off harmlessly, unable to penetrate the alien metal that encapsulated the body, the other two that hit the vulnerable junction between bicep and elbow produced no great fountain of blood, and even the one that imbedded in the neck seemed to have no great effect.

The tree hit the ground, tossing up leaves and dirt, and Konatsu jumped back and away. He ordered his copies to throw their stars as well, and his technique and concentration were up to the task. The stars were really immaterial, but they could cut as well as sharpened steel. The alien spun, presenting its back and pulling in its arms, and the pseudo-stars disintegrated against the metal shell that covered most of its rear surface area.

But Konatsu wasn't done. He still felt fear gripping his heart, especially after seeing how a multi-body technique ninja-star combination had proven ineffective, but there was a building desperation fueled by that fear and by his anger as well. He wouldn't die here! Not before he could get Ukyou to understand how he felt about her! Not before she could learn to understand and reciprocate those feelings! For so long, he'd had nothing, hoped for nothing but to get away from the misery of his beaten down life, but now he had hopes! He had dreams! He had someone he loved!

All three Konatsus leveled their Mk.23 SOCOMs at the creature as it began to face him. Their sidearms were silenced just like their rifles, but in Konatsu's mind each one erupted with a satisfying crack of thunder. Even the fakes, drawing from his pool of _ki_, managed to operate and replicate the weapon's effects. The Floater began to raise its own alien plasma rifle, but never got the chance to fire, as the first of twelve heavy .45 caliber hollow-point rounds hit its arms and face. A few glanced off the armored torso in pyrotechnic flashes of light and sparks, but for every one that did, another hit the creature in the neck, or the head.

Unlike the ninja stars he had used before, and thrown with enough force to imbed into solid concrete, the bullets both penetrated and did substantial damage. The Floater's neck disappeared in a spray of gore, and one of its cruel red eyes blacked out in a shower of purple blood. It howled, baying like a rabid wolf at the moon, and crumpled like wet papier-mâché.

Only after it hit the ground and didn't move, only then did the genius ninja allow himself to breathe. He had never killed before, despite his evil sisters' plans to the contrary, and he found his state of mind torn between disgust and elation. At least the fear wasn't all he felt anymore; that was something to be glad for at least. Then, suddenly, the exhaustion from maintaining his replications and projecting them as weapons began to become stronger than the bloody-minded adrenalin pumping through his veins.

"Good job, Konatsu," Ranma said, and to his surprise, the pigtailed one was behind him. The communications link made it impossible to tell distance from voice alone. He looked over his shoulder at the leader of Juliet Squad, and his remaining duplicates evaporated.

"Good job," he reiterated, and reached over to ease down the male kunoichi's hand, which still held his SOCOM pointed tensely at the alien body. Konatsu nodded behind his helmet's faceplate just enough for Ranma to see the motion, and his arm relaxed, lowering his weapon to his side. Barely thinking about it, he holstered it, and saw Ukyou and Shampoo approaching.

"Ukyou. Take Konatsu and fan to the right," Ranma spoke to them. "Secure that area of the orchard. Shampoo. You're with me. We're going to find you a tree to snipe from. Ryouga – you hear me?"

"I hear you," a voice came back that they all heard.

"The orchard is secure, but we can probably expect a counterattack. We'll cover you while you take the hill to the east and advance to the ship and the farmhouse."

"Got it. Who got a kill just now, besides Konatsu?"

"Why? You keeping count?" Ranma made a soft laughing sound that got cut off by the audio threshold software that handled their comms. "It was Shampoo. Shampoo got the kill. Clean between the eyes."

"Good job, Shampoo," Ryouga said. It was the first time they'd heard such praise from him. "Good job, Konatsu."

"Good work, Shampoo!" Mousse echoed, more heartily. "We're counting on you!"

"You, too, Konatsu-kun," Ukyou said, and slapped him on the back.

"You guys do know that Command and Control keeps a running tally on kills, right?" Ryu added. "I'm just saying."

"Ok, let's go! And let's try and avoid this confusion next time?" Ranma cut in, and motioned Ukyou and Konatsu to his left. The two black clad figures quickly blended into the shadows and disappeared from all but the sensitive eyes of their night vision equipment. Shampoo and Ranma walked only a few feet, before they jumped straight up and into the thickest branches of a nearby tree.


	23. Operation Zebra II

India Squad moved in a much more coordinated fashion, advancing by twos, and searching with the leveled aim of their rifles. Looking at them, an observer from a month ago could hardly place them as Ranma's old foes and foils from Nerima. Soon, they crested the hill, and came into easy sight of the farmhouse.

It was a fairly simple, two story affair, but to Ryouga it seemed eerily familiar. Was this what Akari's farmhouse would have looked like, had a squad of heavily armed soldiers come to her aid? Or his? He motioned for Mousse and Kuno behind him to pause, as they moved at an angle, searching the windows and the roof. The UFO itself was parked right next to the building, larger than the house, and far more ominous, the smooth, cold, alien metal looming like an evil mountain in the darkness.

"There: one of the exits," Ryu said, and pointed to a flat face on the lowest tier of the UFO.

"Good eye," Ryouga commented, but held up his hand and waved them over to the right. The four moved quickly and efficiently towards the farmhouse, moving past a creaking wooden gate to the fence, and up along the side. A small flower garden lay untouched and untended, the bright flowers a sharp contrast with the morning dusk, waiting for a sunrise that seemed too long absent.

"Mousse. Ryu. Search the house. No explosives, no big attacks. There could still be people inside," Ryouga explained, and advanced slightly to a crouch facing the UFO's exit door. "Kuno and I will cover the UFO."

"Got it," Ryu said, and nodded.

"Right," Mousse seconded. The two headed around to the door on the patio, and headed inside. Kuno grumbled something that didn't come out clearly over the communications channel, but he crouched to Ryouga's side and kept his rifle at the ready.

Inside the house, Mousse and Ryu lowered their MSG-90s, and strapped them into place behind their backs. Any mission where civilians were involved, high explosives were generally put aside in favor of precision weaponry. From the beginning it had been XCOM's mandate that it use a scalpel whenever it could, and a bludgeon only when necessary. Of course, it was also XCOM's standard mandate to engage at long range, and avoid close combat…

Not so for the Nerima recruits. Indoors, they felt more at ease, more comfortable, safer. Or at least they did in theory. Quietly, both Mousse and Ryu didn't feel much better inside than they did out in the open. Ryu kept his arms up and at the ready, while Mousse kept his hands in his sleeves, and his arsenal of weaponry there at the ready. Inside his sleeves, however, hidden fingers moved anxiously, curling and uncurling.

They entered a living area from the patio. The room itself was tidy; the center table was bear, and the silence overpowering. It seemed for all intents and purposes like a normal home, a place for a family to huddle together in cold winters, and sip lemonade together on warm spring afternoons. It was easy to see into the kitchen, where the microwave clock flashed 12:00, but another clock in the form of a black cat stared out at them with motionless, empty eyes.

"I'm getting a bad feeling…" Mousse warned, as they turned from the kitchen towards the stairs and the lower floor bedroom and bathroom.

"Just now?" Ryu replied, the night vision granted to him by his helmet not fully assuaging his sense of there being something present, but unseen. "I've had that feeling since we landed. Did you notice how there are no animals on this farm?"

"Downstairs is clear," Mousse confirmed, heading back to the stairs. "How many occupants were there on this farm?"

"Three." Surprisingly, it was Kuno who responded. "Two elderly persons, the owners of this property, and their daughter in law."

"Stick boy's right," Shampoo chimed in. "Which means everyone look out for flying pigs."

"I saw P-chan clear a good fifty feet in one leap," Ranma commented blithely. "Does that count?"

"Ranma – how are things on your front?" Ryouga asked, changing the topic. "You get to the other UFO exit yet?"

"Just about. We're movin' slow. No other contacts yet."

"Good," Ryouga then added, "Let's keep the chatter to a minimum."

"We're heading upstairs…" Mousse nodded to Ryu, and they started their way up to the second floor. They were vulnerable here, and they both knew it, and they hugged the wall to improve their field of vision. Both teens reached the top, when suddenly their armor beeped a warning.

"What the…?" Ryu paused. "Psionic activity detected? That means I'm being attacked, right?"

He didn't feel any different.

"Same thing here," Mousse said, a moment later. "Could be a scan, though, remember? It doesn't mean we're under attack."

The top floor consisted of a short hallway, and a handful of doors including one at the end of the hall. They knew how to handle this. One of them watched the other doors, the other began searching them, but they kept together to support the other. Mousse steadied himself against the first door, readied his hands to unleash any number of weapons, and knocked it open with his elbow, shattering the lock on the door.

What met him was an open field of long grass, waving slowly in the breeze. In the distance, mountains rose to hold up the heavens. Mousse froze, recognizing instantly where he was… this was China. This was home. He saw shapes move past him: slumped figures with beaten down postures, and wide conical hats to ward off the sun and the rain.

He stared, wide eyed, as the other men of the Amazon village passed him, heading out into the fields to do the hard labor the warriors of the Tribe considered beneath them. He reached for the sleeve of one of the men, and marveled at how small his hand was. He pulled, just a little harder, and the tall man turned to look down at Mousse, his gaunt face more like a skeleton's than a human being.

Mousse recoiled, his breath caught in his throat.

And then something hit him from behind, and he lost his balance, falling flat on his face. He could feel the dirt and the mud caked on his face, and the blades of grass between his fingers. He heard laughter behind him, and shook his head. What was happening? Why had he been hit? How did he get back here!

The feminine voice behind him chortled cruelly, and it was a sound amplified and joined in by others like it. Tears came to Mousse's eyes unbidden – tears of shame and self disgust and fear. Gone was the confident Master of Hidden Weapons, and in his place a small child cried, his fingers searching desperately in the grass for his glasses.

"Look at this one! This little Mouse. Do you think he'll find his eyes?"

Mousse felt something round and hard in reach, but a second later it twisted out of his grasp. He started to push himself up, if only to reach further in the right direction, but a second later something heavy fell on his back, forcing him back into the mud.

"You've got mud on my shoe, little Mouse," the voice from above commented cruelly. "I think you'd better apologize."

"That's not my name…" Mousse whispered.

"That didn't sound like an apology!" The mocking voice replied, and Mousse felt something slip under him, and toss him over and onto his back. He couldn't see his tormenter, though he knew her well. She and her friends were all just a blur, a blur that blacked out the sun and made him tremble like a leaf.

"You're weak. Like your mother. Like your father. The Matriarch had hoped to breed out those rotten little eyes of yours, Mouse… but watered down night soil doesn't smell any better, does it?"

"Stop," he pleaded, hating his words, hating his life, hating everything. "Please."

"A puny male like yourself shouldn't be giving orders to an Amazon warrior," the voice took on a haughty tone. He could see a flash of pink, as the face of his oppressor licked her lips. A second later, he saw another shape: the head of a spear, inching towards him.

"Come on. That's enough," another voice said, and chuckled. "Look. He's wet himself."

"Just a moment more. I want to remind him of something," the other voice, of the woman holding the spear to his throat, came back, louder than before. "That I can kill him at any time I choose. That I can kill him on a whim. He isn't like the others…"

"Not…" a little jab. "Just…" And another, drawing blood. "Yet."

"Don't kill me…" Mousse whispered, tears turning what was left of his field of view into an impossible murky haze. "Don't kill me! Don't kill me please! PLEASE!"

Ryu could feel the house shaking, buckling under the power of his father's blows. He knew abstractly what was happening, but he couldn't do anything to stop it. His father was intent on mastering the _Yamasenken_, even if the dilapidated Kumon Dojo wasn't up to taking the abuse. He cried and screamed, but his father ignored him, and then everything began to fall apart.

Beams of wood fell, and Ryu's muscles and honed body weren't there to save him. He was just a boy, and his world was coming apart at the seams. He howled in fear and grief, as a heavy plank of wood fell, slamming into his father's right side. The man turned, his eyes glazed over from a concussion, and Ryu caught only a glimpse of his face before more rubble fell, and claimed him.

Ryu felt his small arms cover his head as he tucked into a little ball, curled tight into a fetal position with his eyes closed. He felt things hit him, and hit near him, and when he opened his eyes, he found only darkness. A small hand reached out, terrified and alone, and scraped at the debris that entombed him. He was buried… buried alive in the ruins of his own home…

"Help me… help me… help me!"

He clawed away like an animal in a trap, breaking off his fingernails in his frantic bid for freedom. "Someone HELP ME!"

Mousse shook his head in horrified denial. This wasn't what was supposed to happen. They were supposed to let him go! His hands, his child's hands, were not up to the task of holding back the spearhead that now impaled his throat. He could feel his lifeblood draining away and his body turning cold. Everything seemed so dark, so far away, so insignificant...

But it was wrong!

He hadn't died! She had arrived, and shamed the others into leaving him alone. She had arrived, and in an act of kindness to a complete stranger, had handed him his glasses and sparked the flames of love in him for her. Where was she? Why wasn't she here!

He couldn't cry her name, but his desperate mind reached for her, yearned for her – and like that, she was there. Shampoo, adult and in her full glory, stood as clear and radiant as the dawn against the murky haze of the rest of the world. The others, the faces, turned on her with obvious contempt. That, too, had never happened before.

Shampoo placed her hand gently on the shaft of the spear that impaled him, and it dissolved. The faces of the others contorted in spite and hate, spitting bile and hissing, eyes smoking and burning like embers. Shampoo stood over him, between them and him, and offered him her hand.

Seeing her, feeling what was happening in his mind, Mousse realized what had happened, and what was happening. A new anger suffused through him, directed at those who would violate his mind and his memories so cruelly, so callously. So efficiently. He reached up, and took Shampoo's hand, and felt his Ego Barrier solidify around his consciousness. Then, with his other hand, he directed his willpower and his hate at the alien presence that wormed through his mind, pulling up his bleakest memories to use against him.

"Get. Out," he snarled, throat repaired, and voice back to normal. "Of my head!"

Ryu broke through the rubble, a tiny speck of light serving as his guide. The remains of a table, a broken piece of splintered wood, a little more tile, and he was free. Pushing his hand through the opening, he could feel the open air, and with his arm he enlarged the hole. He was determined not to give up, not to stop, until he had seen his father. He would save him! He would save the Dojo! All by himself if he had to!

Emerging from the wreckage like a cocoon, Ryu saw his father's arm and part of his upper body, crushed under a support beam. His own fear from being trapped now put aside, along with the pain in his hands, legs, and arms, he walked slowly towards his father's still form. He felt exhausted, weary to the bone, but he kept going, reaching for the only parent he had ever known.

"Father… father wake up," he began to cry, finally close enough to feel his father's limp hand. By the angle of it, he could see the arm was broken at the elbow, a jagged white bone peeking out from ragged flesh.

"The Yama… Yamasenken…" his father muttered, a trace of life still in his battered body. "Master… must Master it… save the Dojo…"

"Father!" Ryu tentatively placed his hand on his father's brow. "Don't move! I'll… I'll… go get help!"

"Ryu? My son…." And then, as a chill ran through the young boy's body, Ryu realized something from this memory was odd. Wrong. His father began to raise his head, his glazed over eyes now white and red; blood leaking down his cheeks like tears. His face was gaunt, tight, drawn back, like thin leathery skin pulled over a skull and tied with string in the back.

Lightning fast, his father's hand, in defiance of being attached to a broken arm, lashed out and seized the boy by the neck. Strong fingers enveloped his windpipe, and threatened to cave in his neck bones. Ryu choked out a sobbing cry, but he couldn't escape the grip. He tried to scream, but nothing came out from between his lips.

"You… want to kill me…?" Ryu tried to ask, disbelief slowly becoming something else. His head lolled back, and for a few seconds, his breathing slowed. Then, his arm also snapped out like a serpent. It was not the arm of a child, but that of a man, laced with well-trained muscle. His hand seized his faux father by the throat, and Ryu began to laugh.

"I wouldn't let my own father kill me…" He faced the creature again, and began to stand. His grip, his powerful legs, his power - that latter attribute which dwarfed the abilities of the real father he knew - served to haul this fake up and out of the debris it had been crushed by. Ryu, taller than his actual father, held this doppelganger up in the air, its toes barely touching the ground.

With a little more pressure, he felt the bones beneath his fingers break.

"I wouldn't let my own father kill me," Ryu repeated, smirking now. "What makes you think I'll let you have that honor? I'll live… and rebuild the Kumon Dojo… no matter what it takes!"

His Ego Barrier in full force, rejecting the alien presence in his mind, Ryu felt the power travel down his existential arm. The force of it blew away the alien mind he held in his grip, searing it to the bones before scattering it as ashes at his feet. Ryu breathed a sigh of relief, and he felt the world around him, the ruins of his old home, the old Dojo, fall apart like a sandcastle hit by a wave.

He was back in the farmhouse, wearing his personal armor. His eyes darted down, and he saw the psionic warning indicator still flashing. How long had he been blanked out? He whirled around, looking for Mousse, and nearly stumbled at what he saw. Mousse was on the floor, unconscious or dead, Ryu couldn't tell… and standing nearby was the source of it all…

One of the Floater aliens hovered in arms reach. It was unarmed, but Ryu wasn't about to pull his punches on account of that. The Floater turned from Mousse's prone body towards him, red eyes glowing and fanged mouth agape in some sort of alien mockery of laughter. Ryu pounced, lashing out with a pivoting backhand.

To his surprise, the alien managed to block the strike to its neck, raising one hand to deflect the strike, and bringing forward the other, which now possessed … a sword? Where the hell had it gotten a sword! Ryu barely avoided having his head halved. Using his backward motion from dodging back and to the side, he reached up and grabbed the back of the sword with his right hand, and the front with his left, in a version of the famous butterfly technique. Twisting his grip, he pulled the weapon out of the surprised hands of the alien, as well as bending the metal into an unusable L shape.

The alien jumped back, hands coming together. It was a pose Ryu recognized…

"Mousse?" he yelled.

The Floater landed softly, hovering just a half meter off the ground, staring at him intently. The two locked eyes, and not moving any other part of their bodies, looked to the side at the body on the floor. Sure enough, it moved, holding an alien weapon neither martial artist was yet certified or trained to use. It wasn't hard to see who it was aiming at, as it floated up off the ground, visage shimmering like a mirage.

Ryu dove and tucked into a roll, as a bolt of blazing green plasma shot through the air, disintegrating the wall and roof where it impacted, and leaving a hole the size of a fist that led all the way to the early morning sky. It tried to adjust its aim as it fired again, and Ryu could just feel the heat from the blast that hit the wall to his right.

"Got ya, you…" Mousse began to say, and Ryu slapped down his hand to stop his movement and spring back to his feet. He saw Mousse with his hands out, chains having torn the weapon out of the alien's grip. The Floater wasn't yet helpless, however, as it reached for a something at its waist: a round object attached to its metal torso.

"Grenade!" Ryu hissed, but didn't react on impulse and try to escape. Crossing his arms, he ran forward across the room, accelerating faster than an Olympic sprinter. When in range, he unleashed the _Moko Kaimon Ha_ or 'Fierce Tiger Crashing Through Gates.' Spreading his arms wide, he slapped open the alien's guard, and kept it from activating the alien grenade that, he had no doubt, was probably strong enough to destroy half the house and kill anyone nearby. Normally, he'd yell something to distract the opponent before that part of the technique, but what did one say to distract an alien?

No time to wonder; no time to care.

His opponent disarmed and open, Ryu lashed out with his most powerful kick, right into the gut of the opponent. Only too late did he remember just what he had chided Shampoo about forgetting, a few days ago: it was almost pointless to hit the armored torso or lower body of a Floater! Still, it was too late now to stop. Hit foot impacted the creature right in its center, and the blow sent it flying back, crashing into and through the wall.

"Ryu! Mousse!" Ryouga's voice came in clearly over the communications channel. "What the hell was that!"

"One moment," Mousse replied, and Ryu saw him move like a blur, running past his side and leaping gracefully into the air like a bird of prey. The Floater had already hit the ground, tumbling through a hedgerow, battered but still very much alive. While Mousse took to the air, Ryu saw the grounded creature raise another weapon, small like a pistol, and try and take aim – at what, he couldn't tell.

In the end, it didn't matter.

"Takazumeken," Mousse said, barely loud enough to be heard. No sooner had it been said, than two thin blades rained down, impaling the alien's hands and staking them to the ground. A second later, the Hidden Weapons Master's feet made contact with the Floater's face. The heavy alien bone held for all of a millisecond, before shattering like glass from the force of the Hawk Talon Blow. Even the ground itself shattered, a small crater forming from the impact, and six long furrows cut into it, as if by the raking claws of a titanic bird snatching its prey.

Without another word, Mousse jumped again, back flipped through the air, and landed exactly where he had left a few seconds before. Both boys paused to confirm that the fight was over, and then quickly took cover away from the hole in the wall. The last thing they needed was to be picked off because of post-victory cockiness.

"Psionic warning's turned off," Ryu said with no small amount of relief.

"I thought those purple Floater creatures didn't have psionic attacks!" Mousse barked, with more lingering aggravation and anger than his companion.

"The aliens coordinate using psionics," Ranma's voice explained. "If any one of them sees you, then their leader sees you, and can attack you mentally. We covered this, remember?"

Mousse was silent.

"Is the upper floor clear?" Ryouga asked, a little impatiently.

"One second. We're almost done." Ryu pointed to the door, and he and Mousse moved back to the hall, and checked the next room, which happened to be the master bedroom. The bedrolls were disturbed, and unmade, but it was otherwise empty. The last door at the end of the hall was the bathroom. Mousse checked the handle.

"It was locked," he confirmed, getting a close look at it, and emphasizing the past tense. They'd all read how it was quite easy for a psionically gifted alien to will open a locked door, and this one had the trademarks of that procedure: it was unlocked and the screws were loose, but otherwise intact. Inside the bathroom, a set of nightclothes lay discarded on the tile.

"Nothing in this room either," Ryu confirmed, searching the last room. "There is a cradle in here, though."

Ukyou's voice came in first at that. "Cradle?"

"Yeah," Ryu replied, walking over to the empty crib. "Let me check it on thermal."

He leveled his rifle at the little bed, and flicked on the heat sensor. Sure enough, it showed a ring of heat lingering where there had once been a body. Cursing under his breath, and radioed it in.

"There was definitely something in this crib, and pretty recently too."

"Damnit," Ranma cursed. "We have to pick up the pace, then."

"We're headed back down," Mousse added, and he and Ryu headed for the stairs.

"Ryouga!" Ranma continued. "We have to pick up the pace. Are you listening, lost boy?"

"I am," Ryouga replied, finally, his tone calm despite the common barb at his directional dysfunction. "The plan is still the same. Your team do their job, and we'll do ours."

Ryu and Mousse emerged from the patio, and made their way back to Ryouga and Kuno. Since hearing the news, a new layer of anxiousness had settled on everyone, and it was palpable to even non-martial artists and the _ki_ insensitive that everyone was eager to storm the UFO itself. On the horizon, the sun began to crest the tree line.

"We're almost in position…" Ranma came in, speaking for Julie Squad.

"The door!" Kuno suddenly interrupted, and the whole of India Squad, caught milling about, jumped to face the UFO while Kuno drew his sword.

A second later, all hell broke loose.

"Aiya!" Shampoo yelped, as the sound of distant weapons fire erupted. At the same time, a weapon fired from behind the cover of the UFO's hatch on full auto, spraying green fire indiscriminately in the direction of the farmhouse. Almost all of them ducked, and tried to find cover. Ryu and Mousse threw themselves to the ground, finding a measure of defilade in a shallow depression next to the flower garden. Ryouga cursed as he ducked behind the side of the house.

Only Kuno stood his ground.

"Kuno! You idiot!" Ryouga roared. "Get down! Find cover!"

"Ran-chan! Ran-chan!" Ukyou yelled over the comm. "Konatsu!"

"KUNO!" Ryouga repeated, gritting his teeth. "What the fuck are you doing!"

It was then that the scion of House Kuno fell back, like a chopped tree, his chest bubbling and burning like black oil. Without even thinking, Ryouga scrambled out, the alien still firing wildly at them from behind the cover of the doorway, and grabbed Kuno by the shoulder. Pulling him through the dirt, and across the flowerbed, he grimaced at the sight.

"Man down!" He cried, and unstrapped the medikit behind his back. "Ryu: do something!"

"Heads up!" Ryu warned, and a second later a grenade exploded near the UFO doorway. Further away, more hissing plasma blasts and the sound of explosions punctuated the coming of the dawn. The hilt of a sword, the guard half melted and the blade gone above that, lay abandoned in the dirt.

"KUNO!"


	24. Operation Zebra III

* * *

Ukyou covered her head and rolled out of the way as a tree crashed to the ground at her side, the lower end of it charred solid and pointed enough to replant it in the ground. The leaves seemed to shake and tumble in midair in slow motion as she moved, rolling back and onto the soles of her feet in one smooth movement. From the moment they'd hit the ground, the fighting hadn't been what she'd expected.

They'd trained against stationary targets, where they'd had time to line up shots. The only times they'd used moving targets had been when the Squads trained against each other, and that seemed a lifetime ago. She could only see the aliens thanks to her night vision and the HUD built into her helmet's visor, but she damn well knew she couldn't hit them with her rifle. Two had appeared out of nowhere, firing from behind a stone wall, and another had risen out of a seemingly undisturbed field of … of who knew what!

She didn't have special techniques like the rest, not ones suited for this sort of fighting. She back flipped, and saw another green plasma blast hit the ground, leaving a long, smooth black scorch mark and a shallow crater big enough to swallow her hand. Other blasts had punched holes through not just one tree, but two, and another had hit a rock and blown it up just inches from her face. If not for the armor, she'd have been lacerated.

So she pushed herself to her limit, and moved at top speed. She wasn't the fastest of the martial artists gathered to fight, but she knew she could damn well put ninety nine point nine percent of humanity to absolute shame. She zipped behind a bush, popped out of a crouch, spun in midair and tossed a duet of grenades.

So much for subtlety.

She'd learned soon after the fight began that the aliens were outside the normal forty-meter range of a M61 grenade. Sure, she could throw it further than that, but it would go off in midair. Luckily, she had taken the precaution of picking out a more diverse arsenal of toys before they left the ship. She watched, eagerly, as one of her little packages lit up: it was a simple electroflare.

The other, however, was a M86X Proximity Detonated Mine. The original version, designed for US Special Forces, was generally employed as a trap that, after being set, expelled seven 6-meter long trip wires. The improved UNETCO version used more accurate motion detectors and software to arm, distinguish, and discriminate between friendly and unfriendly objects in the vicinity. Of course, it was still generally meant to be used as a rapidly deployed trap, but that didn't preclude a more aggressive use of the device when appropriate.

Ideally, the flare would get the enemy's attention, and…

A thunderous explosion some distance beyond the stone wall gave her hope that things had worked out as intended. She looked around quickly. Her visor HUD had little arrows displaying where her teammates were, and she found Shampoo first, leaning up against the side of a broken tree, holding a weapon much larger than the MSG-90.

"I'm firing!" She yelled taking the opportunity Ukyou had given from the rain of alien fire. The weapon began to bark, coughing up 40mm grenades at full auto, the air bursting munitions from the Striker 40 devastating the alien position.

"They're falling back!" Ranma yelled, from his position with Konatsu to their left. "Ukyou! Swing around! Don't let them get back to the ship! Shampoo! Cover fire!"

Ukyou started to run, when her armor beeped a warning. A green triangle with a multi-pronged star in it flashed, and it was obvious what it meant. There wasn't anything more solid than a tree to hide behind, so she jumped and took to the air, and brought out her woman-sized spatula to cover the side of her body. Another explosion leveled a quarter of the orchard, uprooting trees and sending branches flying for well over a mile. Alien grenades were almost entirely concussive; creating a massive shockwave that could reduce an unshielded human target into bloody jelly.

Ukyou landed on her feet, shaken but unhurt. She spun her mega-spatula and raced over the open ground to cut off the alien retreat. To her surprising reassurance, she saw Shampoo racing alongside her, holding the nearly 20 kilogram auto-cannon in one hand as she ran. They were inside the forty-meter mark, and both women quickly shifted tactics.

A handful of gleaming metal throwing spatulas glittered between Ukyou's fingers. Shampoo strapped the autocannon back behind her back, and brushed her hands past her upper thighs. When her hands came back up both brandished Chinese butterfly knives. The side of the UFO loomed nearby, closer and closer, and out of the smoke both girls could see shapes rushing towards it.

"Moko Takabisha!"

A yellow sphere blasted into one of the bodies, that of a small bulbous creature. It disappeared into the light, but a sick crunch filled the air as the sound of it impacting the wall of the UFO made its fate all too clear. Ukyou's arms went wide, and her flurry of bladed spatulas hit the two leading creatures, both Floater types. Imbedding in flesh, but not doing enough damage to kill, they forced the aliens to pause and try and bring up their weapons to get a bead on the fast approaching martial artists, but they were just a second too late.

Ukyou swung up with her megaspatula, aiming for an arm, but hitting the main body, doing only superficial damage to what little exposed skin and muscle existed there. The alien tried to bring down its weapon like a bludgeon, but the movement was far too slow and predictable. Ukyou blocked it with the shaft of her weapon, pivoted to get the narrow, blunt end of it under the creature's armpit, and flipped it in the air like a hot okonomiyaki on the grill, ready to be served. As it hit the ground, she brought the sharpened end down in a merciless chop, beheading the creature.

Shampoo, likewise, could feel the fighting turn in their favor as she got in close. Her butterfly knifes, not her preferred weapons (bonbori were her favorites, but they were a little unwieldy given how much she had already agreed to carry, and how their foes were resilient to impact over most of their body), still managed their deadly work with grim efficiency. She cut up and slashed wide, and an alien hand flew through the air, spurting purple blood and still clutching its rifle. Another scissor strike, and it was over.

Konatsu and Ranma blurred as they moved, faster than either of the girls, overtaking the other creature that had been behind the Floaters. It was carrying a larger weapon, more bulky and unwieldy than the others. It never had a chance to do anything more than flinch before Ranma stopped next to it, his left hand still extended. The Sectoid fell to the ground, the strike faster than any of those present could actually follow, its weapon flying up into the air, and landing in Ranma's hand a second later.

Konatsu was on it a heartbeat later, jabbing a metal rod at the misshapen creature's upper chest. It let out a high-pitched squeal and its body thrashed for all of a second before going totally limp. Ranma didn't even bother to look in that direction; he pointed right at the door to the UFO.

"Ukyou, you're with me," he moved flat against the UFO, his eyes never leaving the door. "Konatsu! Shampoo! Check the back fields once we head inside!"

* * *

The Sectoid screamed as Ryu's _Kijin Raishu Dan_ cut clean through it lengthways, the two halves peeling away from each other like the lips of a banana. It joined two other alien corpses at the front of the UFO door, as the creatures that had attempted to sally out had been cut down in a vicious exchange of bladed weaponry, _ki_, and plasma fire.

"Kuno!"

Tatewaki Kuno, of the noble and ancient House of Kuno, felt like shit. Groaning, he blinked his eyes as his vision slowly came back. The world that greeted him was a shade of light green from the active night vision in his helmet. Yes: that was it. He remembered it all now. For a moment, he thought he'd eaten some of beautiful Akane's cooking (or those vile noodles that the Cat Café had had once), but all that had happened was getting shot at by some damnable space alien.

"I… live on!" Kuno tried to say, but winced, and amended himself. Those other pains, even the ones from Akane's sweet _mochi_, had quickly gone away, but this one wasn't. He wanted to see his body, see where it hurt and why, but he couldn't with all his new armor on. How had the wounded samurai done it, he wondered?

Looking forward, he saw a display bordered in red. That usually meant it was important, though he didn't recall seeing this particular one before in his training sessions. Perhaps he should have read that book that the others had mentioned? As if he would! Instruction manuals were for fools, not great men such as himself.

He stared at the red box, regardless. There was a picture of a man, with his arms at his sides. Most of him was the color of onyx, but the parts around the chest were red and yellow. Obviously, it was telling him where he'd been hit. As if that was helpful!

Fool machine.

"My sword," Kuno managed to say, concentrating on what was important. "Where is my sword?"

The closest member of his Squad, the violent wanderer named Ryouga Hibiki, stood over him with a piece of equipment Kuno was sure he'd seen before. Why was it so easy to remember some things, like the entire cast of _Shichinin no samurai_, and not other things? It made no sense.

"Keep your head down, Kuno," Ryouga told him, and shook his head. "Your sword's in worse shape than you are. The blast only penetrated the third layer of your armor. Says here you've got some second degree burns, but nothing critical."

Kuno felt tempted to follow that prognosis with a boast about his invincibility, but the pain in his chest, and the sight of a jagged oval hole in the armor right over his heart gave him pause. The black exterior had been scored away by the alien weapon that had hit him, exposing what looked like white foam and a broken lattice of blue and copper wires. What would have happened without it, if being hit with armor on had knocked the wind out of him like it had?

"Back!" Ryouga grabbed him, and tossed him to the side as a trio of green blasts pinned them down.

"It's that bastard from before!" Ryu yelled, ducking his head as the arm and its gun stuck out of the doorway and opened fire. There wasn't even much of an opportunity to get up and advance at an angle and 'slice the pie,' since the door slid up and down so quickly, acting as a shield.

Ryouga spared Kuno a quick look, and stood up, crossing his arms. When they uncrossed a second later, two bandannas dangled from each hand. Slowly, the lost boy began to move his wrists, and spin the pieces of cloth. As the fire began to pick up again, he snapped one hand, and then the other. The spinning yellow and black buzzsaws headed out away from the UFO for about fifty paces, before sharply curving and heading back in just the wrong direction. Instead of returning to their thrower, like a proper boomerang, they careened way off course, and right into the open UFO doorway.

An arm fell to the ground holding the offending plasma rifle, and a blood-curdling scream echoed from inside the ship. Suddenly, it was quiet. Suddenly, the sound of gunfire and life or death battle seemed far away. There was only silence.

For a few seconds anyway.

"Ukyou, you're with me," Ranma's voice grated on Kuno's nerves, no matter the situation. "Konatsu! Shampoo! Check the back fields once we head inside!"

"Ranma," Ryouga said into his helmet. "Kuno's wounded, but we're still good to go."

"I am not wounded!" Kuno corrected the man that, for some reason, had been chosen instead of himself to lead India Squad. "Do not unman me by spreading such falsehoods, Hibiki."

Ryouga shook his head. "Even if you weren't hurt, what are you going to fight with?"

Kuno looked down, and saw the hilt of his family sword. The same attack that had laid him out had also blasted clean through the priceless heirloom. Lowering his head, he muttered a silent apology to his ancestors. The others, mistaking the gesture, began to move towards the door of the UFO, which kept opening and closing on account of the severed arm in the way.

"Hold!" Kuno stopped them, and kneeling down he scooped up the remaining upper two thirds of the katana. The parts near the severed end were partly melted, but at least the top one half of what had been the sword remained in useable condition. Clenching it tightly in his right hand, he raised his head proudly.

The three other members of India Squad stared at him.

"Kuno, you're with Mousse. Ryu, with me." Ryouga turned, and walked towards the door. The others smiled behind their helmets, and nodded. Ryu went ahead of the lost boy, and the two were the first to enter the alien vessel.

* * *

"Ukyou and I are entering… now," Ranma said, as he pulled back his hand, prompting the hatch in the alien Harvester to open. It was darker inside than it was outside in the open air, and Ranma immediately noticed firsthand the differences between this ship and the one he and Ryouga had fought in before. He had thought that had been a terrible enough sight… but this…

Everywhere inside the large room, the operation theater that had been identified on the floor plans, were containers. They were literally littered right and left, and each one overflowed with horrors. Parts of creatures floated in varying states of digestion, lit from within by a hellish electrical glow. Severed heads and animal skulls rested at the bottom of fluid filled cylinders, alongside entrails and other select organs that had been surgically removed.

Ranma remembered, just then, something his mentor had mentioned to him about Harvester craft. How, on a mission to seize a Harvester two years ago, he had seen an entire family put in one of those digestion chambers, and how their remains were huddled together even after most of them were already gone… Ranma shuddered.

"That's why they have to die, Ranma. That's why there's no room for compromise." Captain Banks, a veteran of years of fighting against Earth's visitors, still spoke with passion about what he had dedicated his life to. "You can't see that sort of thing… without it changing you. And sooner or later, you'll see it too. We all do."

"Ucchan…" Ranma began to say.

"You don't have to protect me, Ran-chan," Ukyou cut him off. He couldn't see her face, but the slight strain in her voice told him all he needed. She wanted to go, but she had to stay. She had to work through this.

"Alright," he settled on saying, and the two moved slowly from one horror to the next. Finally, they came to the operating area itself, where the still breathing body of a cow lay upside down, hooves splayed wide. Arms and surgical devices curled around the sides and over the open body of the animal, like the legs of a crushed spider in a final embrace. Pools of fluids collected in vats nearby, and the sound of some machine sucking or slurping made both teens want to vomit.

And that was without having to even smell the air.

"Ranma!" Ukyou saw something on the floor, and walked past Ranma towards it. He kept one eye on her, and another on the dark and hidden spaces that seemed to surround them. Ukyou held up something small: a tiny shirt. He silently cursed.

"I don't hear any crying… do you think…?" Ukyou ventured to ask.

"Just keep your eyes open," he replied, hating how his attention was now so terribly divided. They had to be careful and look for the enemy, but they had to look for the baby, too. Unfortunately doing one meant doing a disservice to the other.

"This is India Squad," Ryouga's voice interrupted Ranma's thoughts. "We're on the second floor and splitting up."

Ranma was about to respond, when he saw a flash of movement.

"There!" He yelled, and raced after it. He ducked around another digestion chamber, this one empty, and then a second, before he lost track of the alien. Ranma scanned the holding area, but there were too many misshapen and broken outlines. It was hard to distinguish anything.

"Ran-chan!"

"Ukyou! Stay back!"

"But… what's happening? I…" Ukyou's voice began to take on a frantic edge. "Ran-chan! Ran-chan! Help me! Don't leave me!"

"Damnit!" Ranma jumped on top of one of the chambers, searching desperately for the creature. Looking over his shoulder, he could see Ukyou, her back pressed against the wall and her face in her hands. She was hyperventilating now, and he could just feel the beginning of a scream building up within her.

"Ranma!" Konatsu cried, hearing Ukyou's distress over the comm channel. "Ukyou's…"

"I know!" Ranma yelled, the desperation in his own voice shutting up the cross dressing ninja. Opening his right fist, a ball of _ki_ grew from a pinprick to the size of a baseball. It was red, tainted by his anger, but he didn't plan to attack with it. Instead, he tossed it into the air, and it cast a long red hue on everything nearby. The pigtailed martial artist didn't blink, and he saw the small smooth body move from behind one of the digestion chambers.

Too angry and focused to even speak, Ranma shot in that direction like a bullet. The childlike figure was faster than it looked, and tried to hide again, but Ranma was faster yet, and when he finally found it, he lashed out with a vicious snap kick. The Sectoid pin wheeled through the air, head snapping around a hundred and eighty degrees from the blow.

Ranma was about to turn, to run to check on Ukyou, when he saw something else move within one of the chambers. Tensing, purely on instinct, he deflated when he saw what it was. Together in an empty and unlocked cylinder were the infant Ryu had found the crib for and an unconscious woman Ranma assumed to be the child's mother. The baby was clearly crying, but it was impossible to hear from the outside.

"Ukyou. Are you alright?" he asked, and looked in her general direction. He couldn't see her clearly, though, with two of the digestion cylinders standing in the way. There was a hiss, too, from something moving or opening. "Ucchan?"

"I'm here… I'm ok…" her voice was wary, but recovering. And then, suddenly, she screamed again, "Ran-chan!"

He heard the sound of her mini-spatulas being thrown, a sound not like that of a ninja star or kunai, and ducked his head. No sooner had he moved than a green light descended from above, missing him by mere centimeters, grazing the side of the chamber with the two people in it, and then hitting another chamber head on. This one literally exploded as the superheated gasses within expanded too violently to be contained.

Ranma held up his hands, about to fire a wild _ki_ blast up at his attacker, when the body of a Floater fell to the ground just a few feet away. Three mini-spats were lodged so deeply in its face as to be literally buried in the purple flesh and bone. It still twitched, but otherwise didn't move. Ukyou emerged leaning against one of the cylinders, looking emotionally and physically spent.

"First floor, main chamber secure," Ranma said, with a sigh of relief. "We found the kid and his mom, too."

* * *

"Good to hear. Ryu and myself have the second floor secure. Mousse: report?"

Mousse sighed. "We're at the engine room, but there's a little problem."

He and Kuno waited on either side of a typical retracting doorway. On the opposite end of the small room they were currently in, a trio of scorch marks adorned the wall.

"Problem?" Ryouga prompted.

"One of them is in there, right next to the reactor. Right behind it actually," Mousse explained. He didn't need to add that alien anti-matter reactors didn't react well to explosives or damage of any kind. "We tried a flashbang, but it didn't work. Plus, it shoots at us the second we open the door."

A few seconds passed, before Ranma interjected. "You need help, Mousse?"

The Chinese martial artist stared at Kuno, and the two shook their heads.

"We'll take care of it," Mousse vowed.

"A fine thing to say… but what approach are we to take next?" Kuno asked, still holding tight to the remains of his family sword. "Perhaps it is time to throw subtlety to the wind, and charge the cowardly beast head on."

"Was is really **that** much fun getting shot in the chest?" Mousse asked dryly.

"True valor is an armor no mere jet of superheated plasma can penetrate!" Kuno preened, and laughed heartily.

Mousse felt a bead of sweat one size too large dribble down his brow.

"In that case… perhaps we should," the amazon male actually found himself sort of glad he was teamed up with Kuno.

"You see?" Kuno laughed again; glad someone acknowledged his superior intellect and cunning. "The most complex problems oft have the simplest answers!"

"Mousse," Ranma interrupted, sounding serious. "Do you want flowers or sake on your grave?"

"No comments from the peanut gallery, if you please…" Mousse said with a groan. "Kuno, you take the right, I'll take the left."

The swordsman nodded eagerly.

Mousse just sighed, and dipped his gauntleted hands in his sleeves. They lined up next to the door, and gingerly, Kuno reached out to place his palm against the door's surface. Pulling back it opened, and no sooner did it do so than the alien engineer inside the engine room opened fire. After the first three shots, and before the door could close, the two martial artists jumped into the rectangular room.

Kuno immediately started moving along the wall to the right, but Mousse stayed where he was. The alien was clever, using the first of the ship's two reactor cores as cover, but Mousse had a little surprise in store for him. Or her. Or it. Or whatever the hell it was.

'Hiding won't save you from this…' Mousse thought, and readied himself to unleash the new technique. It was rather different from his normal arsenal, and probably wouldn't even have been possible (or at least not safe) without all the high tech materials at his disposal as an Agent of UNETCO.

"NOW!" He saw the creature adjust its aim towards Kuno, which it seemed to see as the bigger threat. "Ikkatsu Kakudo Hou!"

Thrusting his hands out, Mousse began to draw out one of his newest weapons (Ranma had once called it 'hammerspace' for some reason), but instead of a sword or polearm or bladed chain, a fine spray of dust particles erupted from his sleeves. This dust was, in fact, a refined thermobaric metal that reacted with the oxygen in the air. Mousse knew he didn't even have to pause before snapping his fingers together, rubbing the concealed pads he'd had added onto his gloves, producing a few sparks that…

Instantly, everything in front of the Hidden Weapons Master became an inferno, as the resulting chemical reaction burst into flame and unleashed a jarring shockwave. Mousse could barely feel the intense heat inside the personal armor. After all, it was designed to protect against alien plasma weaponry, which burned hotter than the surface of the sun. Compared to that, protecting against a little homegrown chemical fire was child's play.

Of course, without the armor, the 'Enraged Male Phoenix Roar' technique was essentially suicidal. Even if the shock wave didn't disorient you or destroy your ears, the heat would flash fry you like a thin skinned wonton. And that was only from the backlash. Anything on the receiving end of the technique without serious protection was in for a most unfortunate experience.

Mousse squinted his eyes; he couldn't see his target through all the fire, but at least he was sure Kuno was far away enough not to get hurt. Not that he would, what with the armor he had, but Mousse had seen that it was damaged and he didn't want to take the chance if it could be avoided. For a few seconds, he stood there, and then the flames instantly extinguished, their fuel supply exhausted completely.

Next to the undamaged reactor, the charred body of the Floater alien still hovered unsteadily, its rifle pointing roughly in Mousse's direction. The Chinese boy returned his hands to his sleeves, and smirked confidently.

"How do you like that?" Mousse asked, though of course the creature couldn't have heard him even if it was alive. He was about to add something witty about being able to make the technique even stronger, when the formerly – or supposedly – lifeless alien body began to move, raising its weapon higher until it was level with Mousse's chest.

"W… what?"

Mousse couldn't believe it, could barely bring himself to even try and dodge, when a shape glided behind the creature. Kuno, unable to sheath his sword, none-the-less snapped it to the side, flicking a bit of blood from the edge to clean it. The alien's arm trembled before falling apart into two pieces. A second after those hit the ground, the head slid forward from its position between the shoulders. The rest of the body followed in short order.

"A fine technique," Kuno commented. "However, you forget the nature of our foe."

Mousse had forgotten, and he frowned. Floaters weren't just encased in alien metal; their lower bodies were entirely replaced. Virtually all their major organs, except the brain, were replaced by cybernetic equivalents. The most a fire could do to them was burn the thick hide and muscle, and there had remained enough of the latter in this case to still move, albeit slowly and probably painfully. A normal creature would have instantly gone into hypovolemic shock, or would at least be so traumatized by pain and horror that it would be unable to mount any further offense or defense.

"Quite," Mousse settled on saying, simply. His opinion of Kuno, however, went up a notch (to one notch). "Engine Room secure."

* * *

"Things look clear out here, too," Konatsu stood perched on the top of a tree.

* * *

"The sun's coming up," Shampoo commented from further away, next to a fence.

* * *

"Then we're heading upstairs to end this," Ryouga said, and nodded to Ryu. "If you lose communication with us, counterattack as soon as you're able. Mousse, you'll take command of India Squad."

"Let's go!" Ryu had to lead, of course, and they opened the door to the first room with a lift up to the third floor. Ryouga waited there, while Ryu headed back, went down the hall in the second floor, and arrived at the other room.

"Three," Ryouga began.

"Two," they said at the same time. "One!"

Both martial artists emerged in empty antechambers to the alien command and control room. They didn't waste time any extra time or momentum, and opened the final two doors in parallel. No sooner did they step into the main room than their personal armor sensor systems blared a psionic attack warning. Standing alone in the center of the command room was a humanoid shape in titian robes.

**WAITING**

The thought hit their minds like a crack of thunder.

**FOR**

Ryu felt blood drip down over his lower lip.

**YOU**

* * *

"Ryouga? Ryu? Come in! Respond! RESPOND!" 


	25. Through Hell Barefoot I

**NOTE**: A mistake had been made in the initial upload of this chapter, whereby a scene was omitted (the first one). My thanks goes out to "Mr Qwerty" for bringing this to my attention in a review. I don't normally do author note type commentaries, but while I'm here doing one anyway, I will address two things brought up by other reviewers here. First: to a degree, it will be some time before there is another highly involved (full chapter legnth) battle with the aliens, as the story will cover other aspects of the war (against human collaborators and the martial artist hunt). Second: (to a review recently addressed to chapter 4) the Ranma cast is naturally very resistant to change, even under adverse circumstances. I am hoping to present for the most part a gradual development in their personalities and priorities. For most, however, there will be a major event-as-catalyst that will jump start that process or drive it home.

**----- **

The year is 2005. For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. The Nerima Wrecking Crew and their families have been relocated to Seiran Mountain, XCOM headquarters for the Far East. Finally, a mission is sent down for the newly militarized Nerima Wrecking Crew, to cut their teeth against the Alien Menace. As Operation Zebra draws to a victorious close, mysterious powers move to secure their objectives.

-----

**The Road To Cydonia**

Chapter IX  
_Through Hell Barefoot_

-----

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

-----

It was black and brown, the color of dead autumn leaves. Except for the eyes: the pale white eyes that shone with moisture, even in the dark. It was hard to remember, hard to understand, what came next after that first second of savage fury. There existed in the human mind a sort of switch, that when triggered changed the way one thinks from collected rationality to an animalistic state of pure survival.

Teeth.

It had teeth; he remembered that clearly, as it snapped and shook its massive head. He batted at it, without thinking, fighting desperately to keep those yellow and white things from his throat, from his face. It seemed to barely make a sound, but he screamed, as if pure volume could drive it off. It was large, too, larger than he had been.

When it bit down on his arm, he'd felt wetness between his legs, and the shock of it all had focused his efforts. Tuck in the legs, find a surface – there! Push, tuck, roll, get away, still holding on, twisting, a cracking sound, fire shooting up his arm like a hot poker tearing through his flesh and lodging in his brain. Red blood as he wedged his arm free. The scuffling sound as it fell onto its side, and scrambled to right itself.

Not a nightmare.

Don't run.

Don't hesitate.

-----

The doorbell rang again, a third time, as Ryouga walked down the steps of the family home. He had been grateful for the reprieve. He'd managed to find his way home several days ago, but of course no one was around. A note from his mother indicated she'd left a week before he arrived, and his father – who knew? There was no note from him, and he hadn't called. Ryouga wanted to talk to him, too, especially because the last time they'd seen each other they hadn't parted on good terms.

Which was to say that he'd ran away and his father had let him.

Ryouga finally saw the door, and hoped against hope it was one of his parents, and not some stranger. He still felt a little nervous around the locals he didn't know. It was different on the road, where you could always just leave a place or a people. The neighbors here, the postal workers, everyone… they knew. They knew about the 'problem' the Hibiki family had. There was a knowing, suffering, often aggravated way they spoke, or acted, or looked at him, like he was just making things worse by perpetuating a continual frustration in the community.

Luckily, he didn't have a problem walking around the house. He could find his way, he knew, if he'd been in a place often enough. He had a terrible sense of direction, not a complete lack thereof. The doorbell hadn't ringed a fourth time, and he wasn't tall enough to see through the peephole. Was anyone even still there?

"One moment!" He yelled, just in case, and reached up to unlock the door, until all that restrained it was the flimsy little chain – the most inadequate of all door defenses. As if a determined burglar couldn't just push hard on the door, and either break the chain or pop it out of where it was secured into the wall. Still, it felt a little good to have, which was probably the point.

Opening the door a crack, he saw a familiar walking stick, and past it, a familiar face. He gasped, and undid the chain before throwing the door wide open. Bowing his head, he stepped back and aside.

"Grandfather!" He chirped, his head still bowed. "Welcome home!"

Seigo Hibiki was not an impressive specimen. His frame was thin – a stark contrast to his son, Ryouga's father – his eyes slightly sunken, and his mouth drawn back, lips tight together. He resembled, more than anything, the sort of old man you'd find in the hottest section of a public bath. His complexion was lightly tanned, and his skin looked like weathered dry leather. He wore a traveling pack that looked to weigh as much as he did, along with plain brown pants, shirt and jacket. A checkered yellow and black bandanna circled his bald head.

"Hmm. Ryouga," he said, simply, staring at his grandchild with black eyes still sharp and seemingly unfailing. With a faint tap-tap sound, coming from the black tipped end of his wooden cane, he entered the house and began to remove his shoes. Ryouga quickly closed the door, and began to relock it.

"Grandfather… if you don't mind me asking," Ryouga began, as he went up on his tippy toes to reach the highest padlock. "Why didn't you let yourself in? Don't you have your keys?"

"Your mother put in a new lock," the old man answered with a slow, almost meek voice. "I couldn't remember where she hid the new keys for it."

"They're taped to the inside of the mailbox," Ryouga said, done with the door. He watched as the oldest living member of the Hibiki family untied his plain brown shoes, and carefully set them down in the same spot he always used. Like all members of the family, he treated his footwear with kindness and care. When one spent so much time wandering, and walking, it was just common sense to be mindful of the conditions of your feet.

"Would you like something to eat?" Ryouga asked, heading for the kitchen. "Almost everything's expired, but there's some instant ramen I've been making for myself the last few days. And some stuff in the fridge, like frozen dumplings."

"That would be fine."

"The only tea we have is Genmaicha. 'Popcorn Tea.' Is that ok?" Ryouga heard a grunt, and assumed it to be one of acceptance. Grandfather left his backpack leaning against the wall, next to Ryouga's own, and then sat in the kitchen, at the table, and waited. He was a quiet man, and always had been, but he let Ryouga make the food and tea by himself, and the young boy was grateful for it. He wasn't handicapped by his age, by his height, by his inheritance curse, or by anything else. A Hibiki was never keen to admit weakness, even to family.

Serving the food, and the tea, the two of them shared a moment of silence and began to eat. There were no great exclamations of joy at meeting up, or of being thankful for the food and company. Ryouga had seen the displays among the other boys, among other families, as he'd watched from afar. He understood why the Hibikis avoided it. One could become attached to such things, and miss them terribly. There was already enough of a burden, enough to miss, enough to feed the despair and loneliness.

No more.

No more.

He finished first, slurping down the noodles and broth quickly, and then waited for his grandfather, who ate much more slowly and purposefully. Ryouga didn't know his father or mother very well, not really, and he knew even less of his grandfather and grandmother. One of the things he knew, however, was that this fragile looking man that ate only a few noodles at a time was more than just Seigo Hibiki.

He was the Strongest Hibiki.

_Hyakka Kogarashi_ _Hibiki_ – 'Hundred Flower Whirlwind,' both for one of his special techniques, and for the many men he'd killed. His father, with a mixture of morbid familial pride and moral disdain, had told him this years ago. Ryouga had asked, naturally, why someone would give such a gentle sounding name to something he'd been taught was wrong: taking another life. Grandfather, he'd been told, was of the old school. He took lives, when he felt it necessary or just, and he disguised those actions with names that belied their true ugliness.

The old man who sat opposite him had slain a hundred men in one night. He was the last living member of a Nightmare Unit in the Army of the Kwangtung. He was, in a way, the most perfect and horrible creature ever to bear the family name. He had survived, after all, where so many other Hibikis would have died. Where thousands of Japanese fighting men had been carted off to Soviet labor camps, he had returned home, and not on any ship or plane, an unreadable smoldering behind his dark eyes.

Ryouga had never decided whether to admire the man or not.

When grandfather had finished the tea, his cool black eyes rested on Ryouga's left arm, and the sling it was in. The young boy lowered his eyes in respect and shame. He wasn't strong yet. Not like his father, and certainly not like his grandfather.

"Was it a man?" Grandfather asked, finally. "Or a beast?"

"A… a wild boar," Ryouga replied, and shook his head. "I was… lost. It was night, and it got the jump on me."

"A wild boar," Seigo said, in his slow measured tone of voice. "Did you kill it?"

Ryouga, all ten years five months and eleven days of him, shook his head again.

"No, grandfather." He licked his dry lips. "I managed to climb a tree and let it have my backpack."

For a few seconds, there was no reply. Ryouga tentatively looked up, wondering what he'd see on the elder Hibiki's face. Perhaps most parents and grandparents would have reacted with shock, with worry, with panic. Seigo's face showed none of these things.

"You'll get another chance," the old man finally said. "That is also the nature of our curse."

Ryouga wasn't sure whether that news should have filled him with a grim confidence, or a soul shattering fear. Mostly, it was the latter. There wasn't time to dwell on it. Grandfather then asked about where he'd been hurt, and how he'd handled fixing himself up.

He'd explained as best he could. He'd stayed in the tree, and the boar had quickly found the food in his backpack, and that he'd been cooking. After eating it, it had rooted around for a few minutes and then wandered off. As soon as he'd dared, he'd gone back down, gotten his medical supplies, and headed back into the tree with them.

The bite on his arm, the scratches and cuts, he'd poured the burning antiseptic on. Just recounting it, he cringed. The pain had left him numb and he'd cried for what felt like hours. He omitted that in the story, however. There was no need for it. With that done, he'd had to reset his dislocated elbow, and then put together a splint and sling. He'd used one of his three tetanus shots, but there hadn't been any ice available, and the limb had swollen and been sore for days. It hurt to move, to breathe, to walk. He ran a fever, and had trouble keeping food down.

Four days later, he found a village, and they helped to take care of him.

Such was life, for a Hibiki. Not all made it to see adulthood. He had a cousin who'd been hit by a car (in fact, he'd had a close brush with one himself, on an unlit road in the middle of nowhere), and his Aunt had disappeared two years ago. He suspected that his father still held out hope that his little sister was still alive, but two years was a long time to go without a note, a phone call, anything. He couldn't remember either of their faces. They were just names.

Just names.

"Are you healing well?" Came his grandfather's response.

His good arm patted the clean white cloth of his sling. "I think so."

"Are you training?"

Ryouga nodded.

"Good," Grandfather said, and took another sip of his tea. "Take this time to heal. To think. To plan. To train."

"Can…" Ryouga sniffled, and quickly composed himself. "Can you teach me, Grandfather? To be stronger? To fight like you do?"

The old man, the Strongest of his Family, made a sour face.

"Don't be foolish," he said, charcoal eyes almost disappearing as he squinted. "I can not train you. Neither can your father. No one can. The curse prevents it. How many lessons will you have before you get lost, or I do? All any of us can do is train ourselves, for ourselves. A Hibiki relies on no one but himself."

Ryouga stared down at his feet. "I know, but…"

"No. You do not know." Seigo eased himself out of the chair, and reached for his cane, which he'd left leaning against the kitchen's brick wall. "But you will learn, eventually."

"All I can do," he continued, gently tapping the floor with the end of his walking stick. "All we can do for each other as family… is teach how to train, and how to persevere, even when death seems like a release, and an escape from the pain."

Ryouga was quick to follow, as the older Hibiki lead them to the house's small backyard. He only had one arm and both legs to train with, but he was willing. He had to be. There was, for a Hibiki, literally no other option.

"Are you going to show me special techniques?" Ryouga asked, hopeful. "Like father's Tetsununo? Or your Hyakka Kogarashi?"

Seigo sighed. "Even if you could use those things, as weak as you are, you would quickly come to rely on them. Special Techniques of that sort are not what make a man strong."

"Tools make men strong, but spirit makes a man strong. That is what I think." The old man turned slightly, to look at his grandson. It wasn't a loving expression Ryouga saw on his face, but it was accepting. Maybe even proud.

"What do you mean, Grandfather?" Ryouga asked, confused.

"The Bolsheviks had better tools than we did, and they crushed us in Manchuria. Nothing I could do would ever change that, no matter how strong I was then. But my spirit kept me alive where another man would have died. That is what I see the beginning of in you. When that spirit is strong… when it is unbreakable… then you will find plenty of tools to fight with, and your own repertoire of special techniques."

By then, they were in the backyard, and as Seigo turned to face his grandson, he held out his cane. Letting go of it, it fell… cracking and planting itself into the earth with a heavy thud. Ryouga stared, wide eyed, at the seemingly thin and light piece of wood. By the end of the day, he'd learned a few things. By the end of the week, he'd altered his training. By the end of the month, he'd taken off his splint and sling.

By the end of the year, he'd gotten his revenge.

-----

Waves of ephemeral force rippled through Ryu's body. They did nothing to his skin or muscle, but left his nerves on fire. He fell to his knees, as the senseless storm crashed through him, leaving him adrift on a tidal wave of agony. His muscles seized up, and he fought to stay conscious, as the paralysis seeped deeper into his body, slowing his breath and making coherent thought difficult.

He closed his eyes, and tried to summon some sort of defense. This wasn't a mental attack like before. This was telekinesis of the highest order, of the sort no human had ever mastered. Suddenly, he felt a heaviness in his heart, and then on his body. The despair, the emptiness he felt, he instinctively knew was not his own.

Opening his eyes, he saw a sickly green color permeate the air.

Only a few feet away, Ryouga stood, bleeding out an aura of emotive _ki_ unlike any he had seen before. What Ryu couldn't understand was how he was even standing. Their opponent was an Ethereal: the leadership caste of the alien army, an entire race of creatures that survived solely because of their psionic power. Physically, any given Ethereal was little more than a desiccated corpse of withered and atrophied muscle and bone, unable to even support its own weight. Virtually all the blood in their bodies ended up pumped to their one functional organ: their brain.

Every movement of their bodies was an exercise in their power. Ethereals didn't walk; they hovered, mentally holding themselves aloft. Bodily injury meant virtually nothing to them. They were, without a doubt, the most dangerous of all the many and terrible species of alien known by XCOM. Only psionic training and experience were of individual use against them. The only other option was a press of bodies, a rush to overwhelm and exhaust the creature with numbers and firepower.

How was Ryouga standing?

Ryu narrowed his eyes, and stared at the armor clad leader of India Squad. He wasn't as experienced a _ki_ user as the lost boy, or Ranma, but he could see currents to the other boy's aura. There were lines to it, running down Ryouga's arms, glowing incandescent even behind the black alloy and armor. Ryu knew what they were, knew that network of fibers that ran through the body, and he understood why the lost one wasn't on the floor, paralyzed.

The Ethereal did something to efferent nerves – the ones that transmit away from the central nervous system – while at the same time hyper stimulating the afferent nerves, which transmitted sensations like pain in the opposite direction. Ryouga was flooding his entire nervous system with his _ki_, stimulating everything at once. Ryu could follow the principle, as it was similar to what any martial artist of their caliber could do to muscle tissues, but to do that to one's nerves and still be able to stand…

The lines began to pulse, to regulate, like a mental heartbeat. As Ryu watched, he straightened his stance, and raised his arms. The video they'd been shown days ago had said that only a psionic barrier could defeat a telekinetic attack, intercepting and disrupting the attempt before it could take effect. None of them had trained long enough to develop that yet. Ryouga had managed a defense of sorts, countering the alien's attack with one of his own, literally on himself.

It was like setting yourself on fire to keep from freezing to death.

"Now let's see…" Ryouga spoke, his voice strained almost to breaking. "Who burns out first!"

He crossed his arms, untied two bandannas, and snapped back his arms. The motion straightened out the cloth for just a half second, and in that tiny frame of time Ryouga's _ki_ flowed into the material and turned it as hard as steel, locking it in that shape. Both of the lost boy's hands whipped back forward, and the bandannas began to spin like black and yellow buzzsaws.

They crossed the distance between man and alien in a fraction of a second, and then… stopped. In midair. Something rippled in the air around the two bandannas, and they fell to the ground with a metallic clang. Ryu heard a sharp intake of breath, and moved his eyes to where Ryouga seemed to be considering using his rifle. It had a muzzle velocity of around 2,600 feet per second, or over twice the speed of sound. There was no way the alien would be able to telekinetically intercept the rounds.

But Ryouga didn't shoulder the weapon, instead un-strapping it and dropping it on the ground. Then, with his right hand, he undid the Velcro strap on the top of the stun baton holster on his right leg. Getting a good grip on the rubber handle, he retrieved the sleek gray fiberglass rod and began to walk forward, an electrical arc from the pointed tips of the weapon fizzling in the charged atmosphere, leaving a faint trail of blue in its wake.

NO

Ryu felt the presence paralyzing his body lift as that thunderous word echoed in his consciousness. He tried to move, but his arms and legs felt unresponsive and cramped up. Straightening out just his right leg sent a dagger of pain slicing up his spine.

DO NOT APPROACH

The air around Ryouga grew thick and indistinct, like a mirage. The lost boy's feet began to slip and slide back. The Ethereal still hadn't moved from where it floated, but there was no doubt that its attention was now solely directed towards the one still standing threat to its existence. Ryouga took another step, slamming his foot down, and gaining just a little more space than he'd been pushed back.

He held out his left hand, and an oval ball of _ki_ began to coalesce. It was like the beginning of the _Shishi Hokoudan_, but unstable. Bits and pieces of green energy flaked away from the twisting, struggling orb. Ryouga took another step, and then another, each time being pushed back less and less by the Ethereal's psionic onslaught.

NO

The beaten and unstable _Shishi Hokoudan_ suddenly shot out of Ryouga's hand with a clap of thunder. This time, the Ethereal did move, pivoting slightly and floating to the side. The screaming green ball of _ki_ hit the wall behind it, fizzling against the virtually indestructible alien alloy that made up nearly the entirety of the ship.

Ryouga's heavy breathing could be heard over the communications link.

"Yes."

He began to advance.

NO

The Ethereal's robes billowed, and something moved through the air. Ryouga grunted, and stumbled, holding his side. He stumbled, and almost fell, but caught himself at the last second. Ryu saw it again, a shimmering in the air, narrow like a spear, as it shot straight through the lost boy.

"Ryouga! What the hell's happening up there?" Ranma shouted over the comm. system. "Just hold on! Me and Ukyou are almost there, and we got Mousse, too!"

"Do whatever you like," Ryouga managed to reply, as he stood again. "I'll be done in a moment."

He took another step.

DO NOT APPROACH

Another invisible bolt shot through him, but he didn't stumble. Still clutching the stun baton in his right hand, Ryouga took another step, and another. The Ethereal floated back.

DO NOT APPROACH DO NOT

"You aren't the one from before…" Ryouga hissed, and spat something up that interrupted his sentence. "That's good. That means I can take you alive."

In arm's reach of the robed creature, the lost boy tried to bring the stun baton into its abdomen, but a frail black hand caught his wrist, and – impossibly – held him back. With his left hand, he grabbed the alien's right shoulder and pushed it back, slamming it into the wall with a crunch of atrophied bone. Ryouga snarled, trying to force the stun baton forward, but barely making any progress.

YOU

The 'voice' was weaker, but Ryu could still barely hear it in his mind.

KNOW YOU

KNOW HER

LIVES

"Shut up!" Ryouga snarled.

LIVES

LIVES IN US

"Shut the Hell up!" The lost one twisted the stun baton in his grip, and brought it up, into his left arm. The armor's inner layers were insulated, but the outside still conducted electricity. The alien shuddered as the charge shot through it, and in that moment of broken concentration, Ryouga shouldered it hard against the wall, flipped the stun baton into a reverse grip, and slammed it into the Ethereal's forehead. For the first time, it made an actual physical sound: a high pitched wail, like the sound of a tortured banshee.

And then it collapsed into a boneless heap on the floor.

"Hey," Ryu said, still barely able to move, but feeling the paralytic effect wearing off. "Hey! You ok?"

From where he stood over the broken alien body, Ryouga's armored form turned to face the Kumon Dojo heir. For a few seconds, it seemed like he was thinking over his response, but it never came. The so called lost boy didn't say a word until Ranma arrived, and even then it was only to mutter that he needed medical treatment.

A half hour later, lights descended from the sky and drove down the road to cordon off the area and begin packing away all the evidence of what had just transpired. Ryu had stood with Ryouga as they took away the drugged, but still alive, Ethereal. There were still marks on its forehead: two dots within a circle, like a tattoo.

Or a Brand.

It was over.


	26. Through Hell Barefoot II

That same night, miles to the south in Shimonoseki, it was just beginning.

At the base of a five story parking garage, a guard looked up from his book, recognizing the face of the man waiting by the window of his booth holding his parking stub. With a polite nod, he accepted the paper, and slid it into a machine inset into the wall. It made an audible snapping sound as it read and marked the stub.

"Here ya go, Ayabe-san," the guard handed the paper back with a smile.

"Thank you," the businessman replied, inclining his head. As always, the guard noted that Ayabe wore black gloves, regardless of the weather or the seasons. Shimonoseki could get quite hot in the summer, but in the two years he had worked at the garage, the guard had never once seen this one man's hands.

Other than that one quirk, however, Koichi Ayabe seemed like a totally normal person. He was a management type, with an amiable face and a ready smile that wasn't often more than a skin deep courtesy. He never came to work in anything but a suit and tie, and never made any trouble. Really, he wouldn't have stood out at all if not for those black (expensive looking) leather gloves.

"Safe drive," the guard keyed open the door to the bottom level of the garage, and as Ayabe walked away, he went back to reading about improving his love life.

The garage was well lit, but many corners late at night dipped endlessly into darkness. Concrete pillars rose like the rough trunks of trees. Walking slowly up the stairwell, to the fourth floor, Koichi Ayabe patted his left pants pocket, reassured by the feel of the keys there. On this floor, the garage was mostly empty, with only a dozen or so vehicles occupying it.

His blue Nissan Teana wasn't hard to spot, even if he hadn't parked in the same space for almost eight years. It was a sedan, a good replacement car for his old Toyota the kids had thought so little of.

"What was a car without a CD player now-a-days?"

Or so their logic had gone.

Sighing to himself, he took out the car key, jangling together the house keys and other metal bits he'd never sorted through to see which were worth keeping as useful. He was about to press down on the base of the key to unlock the front driver's side door, when he hesitated. Looking behind himself briefly, he slowly put the keys back into his pants pocket.

Turning around, he put his hands in his pockets and smiled.

"Can I help you?" He asked, amiably. It wasn't just something he had picked up from work – where it often helped to talk about financial matters like downsizing in a less threatening and more conciliatory tone – it was almost second nature. Being too obtrusive had always made him nervous, and an easy way to blend in or allay suspicion or jealousy had always been to act and speak in a friendly fashion.

The stranger stood silent in the shadow of a concrete pillar, and Ayabe narrowed his eyes enough to squint. The stranger was tall, possibly a foreigner even, but relatively slim. He wore a knee length white overcoat, like a doctor's. It was open at the front, and beneath it the stranger wore sharply contrasting black clothes harder to make out.

"Are you Ayabe Koichi?" The stranger asked, last name first.

"I am…" the other man answered cautiously.

The stranger then added, "Are you the Ayabe Koichi who also used to be known as the Genius of the Denkouken Style?"

That caught Ayabe's attention. Here, he'd thought this was an attempted robbery, or car jacking. That this person hiding in the shadows knew that much about him, about his past, was totally unexpected.

"I haven't been called Tensai in years," Ayabe explained and withdrew his hands from his pockets, his polite pretense slipping away. "What's all this about? Did you come from the Dojo?"

"I did," the stranger answered, but the tone of his voice hid another meaning behind his words in plain sight. He had come from the Dojo, but obviously not on behalf of it. The two stood in silence for a few seconds.

"It wasn't easy tracking you down," the stranger continued, wearing a false smile as he stepped out of the shadows. "I'd like you to come with me, please. I have some friends interested in seeing your fists."

"Seeing my fists?" Ayabe smirked and cocked his head to the side. "You're rather mistaken, if that's what you want from me. I don't practice martial arts anymore. I have a real job; a respectable job. Tell your friends… if they want to see me, to call my secretary and make an appointment."

The stranger dipped his head in an irritated gesture. He wasn't a foreigner, as Ayabe had at first thought. His features were Japanese, with thin wire rimmed glasses and healthy black hair that came together in a dragon lick ponytail behind his head. He looked to be in his late twenties, or maybe thirties, making him Ayabe's junior by almost a decade.

"We have a van parked just outside this building," the stranger said, walking purposefully towards the businessman. "You can walk there, or be dragged there. I'm sorry, but those are the only two options available to you."

"My only two?" Ayabe asked, and let out a deep sigh.

The stranger stood still a couple paces from the older man. "I wasn't able to find the true Denkouken when I visited the Dojo, and my friends are eager to get their hands on the real thing. They have no use for pale imitations and ordinary athletes."

Koichi Ayabe just shook his head, and removed his leather gloves. No sooner was the first one off, than the stranger's eyes lit up. The second glove came off next, and then they went into the side pockets of the former martial arts genius's jacket. Ayabe held up his hands, and flexed his fingers. Catching the radiance from a nearby light above him, three round pieces of metal could be clearly seen between his knuckles.

"So you have it," the stranger said it, not as a question, but as a statement of fact.

"Yes," Ayabe admitted. "Once I had mastered all but the final techniques of Dankouken, I had this done to myself. Six nails were screwed into the bones of my hands, ten smaller ones into my fingers. All for the Art. All to live up to the arrogant title of 'Genius.'"

He then scoffed.

"I was a fool. And a young man. The worst possible combination." Ayabe's eyes hardened, as he stared at the stranger. "Is this what you wanted to see?"

"Just..." The stranger's voice took on a more urgent tone. "A little more."

"I was afraid you'd say that." Ayabe slipped out of his jacket, and tossed it over onto the hood of his car. As he balled his hands into fists, his aura began to emerge as a cool and vibrant blue. Crackles of white erupted from his hands, leaping into the walls and up into the ceiling where two of the inlaid lights exploded.

Watching the display, the stranger nodded, and pulled tight the sterile lab gloves that covered his hands. "Yes. Show us the power of your Denkouken, Ayabe Koichi."

The middle aged businessman disappeared in a flash of sparks. The stranger dressed as a doctor spun around, and slapped aside an open palm blow. Ayabe didn't pause from surprise, and struck out with an elbow even as he drew back the other arm. He struck again, fast, with another open palm aimed for the doctor's left armpit. It got halfway there before it was intercepted, the bone of both men's wrists meeting.

The doctor blocked another blow with his other arm, and twisted his hand at the wrist, briefly touching the other man's arm with his extended ring finger. He then shifted back; his left foot skidding across the pavement as both his hands came down to block a rising knee. Ayabe was fast, despite his age and lack of practice, and his arms and hands cracked as they snapped like snakes, trying to make direct contact. The doctor managed to block or avoid them all without great difficulty.

And then Ayabe's right palm slammed into his chest, moving from a perpendicular blocking position down into a smooth reverse thrust. There was a thump from the impact, and a second later a thunderous crash resounded throughout the parking garage as the doctor imbedded himself in the passenger side of a parked vehicle, his chest smoking. A wailing alarm erupted from the now ruined two door coupe.

"I didn't kill you," Ayabe said, over the din. "Be thankful for that. But this fight is over."

The doctor groaned, and he twitched, twice. "They're excited now."

Taking a deep breath, the stranger pulled himself free of the wrecked car, seemingly oblivious to the bleeding cut on his left arm. Ayabe watched him with a grim expression.

"That first move was a slight of hand and motion, making it seem as if you had vanished," the doctor began to say, breathing steadily. "It is a common technique, but you also amplified the effect with a split second flash of blinding light produced by your modified fists. After that, you attempted to strike with an open palm, charged with electricity. When you finally hit me with it, after throwing several blows to maneuver me into a position where I could not defend myself. By my guess, your attack carried a direct current of around a hundred milliamperes. In a normal person, with a directed strike to the chest, the result would be instant ventricular fibrillation."

"The techniques you describe are the Denkouken Ryu: Hiraishin Aisatsu Sen (Lightning Rod Salutation Flash), and the Hiraishin Kaizai Satsu (Lightning Rod Intervention Murder). It is a killing technique… I was the first to be able to employ it non-lethally." Ayabe pursed his lips as if in thought. "Still, it should have been more than enough to floor a human like yourself. I wonder if your unusual resistance to electricity is due to the pressure points you tried to use on me?"

The doctor smirked. "Yes. I can see why they called you 'Tenasi.' You are quite right about the pressure points. Well before I came here, I increased my body's resistance to electricity… and to heat."

"A sound precaution," Ayabe replied, nodding.

"Furthermore," the other man's glasses glinted as it lowered his gaze. "I have eyes that cannot be fooled or blinded... Yes. You… you are definitely the one they want."

"I agree," another voice interrupted, this time obviously from a woman. It was a melodious soprano, but casual… or confident. Ayabe turned his eyes to his right side; disturbed that this newcomer had (like the man before her) managed to mask their presence and get within ten meters of him without his _Sakkijutsu_ tipping him off. She was tall, like the man, but otherwise dissimilar.

She didn't bother to try and hide herself like the man had, and Ayabe could guess that she was Chinese from her face and what he'd heard of her accent. Her eyes and hair were a chocolate brown, and she wore what seemed to be a green rain slicker. She also carried a short wooden staff, propped up against her right shoulder. Ayabe mentally chided her – did she think that a little rubber would protect her from him?

He blinked; a mistake.

His _Sakkijutsu_ didn't go off, but he was starting to doubt its sharpness. In an instant, the woman had vanished, not due to a slight of hand combined with high speed, but purely from rapid acceleration. He flinched, readied himself for an attack, but then he felt her presence – and only then saw her – standing next to the strange man in the lab coat. Ayabe kept from betraying his shock and awe at what she had done. He had always been fast, with good eyes, and couldn't remember if he had ever lost track of an opponent since he had achieved higher mastery of the Art.

That wasn't the sort of casual speed that came from just being a Master; it was the mark of someone truly special. Truly powerful. Ayabe had reckoned the man to be extremely skilled, even from just his knowledge of pressure points, from his general ability in hand to hand, and from his ability to mask and control his presence. This woman, however, judging by her speed… she was incredible.

"It won't be long before we're interrupted," she lectured the man, all the while not sounding too worried about the situation. Then, she turned and smiled at Ayabe. "You have a wife and children, don't you? Do you think they can take care of themselves with you gone?"

"You leave my family out of this…!" The normally calm businessman snarled in reply.

"It wasn't a threat," the woman explained. "It was merely to set my mind more at ease with what I have to do."

She lifted her left foot off the ground, and Ayabe could feel the build up of _ki_ in her body, like a drop in barometric pressure from a distant tornado or hurricane. It terrified him, and he instinctively internalized his own _ki_, converting it into one of the most powerful of the Hidden Denkouken Arts, supplanting the normal neurochemical and action potential functions of his cells, and increasing their speed and efficiency two fold.

His skin burned and his business suit tore as he threw his body through the air, the friction painful against his out of practice flesh. The world was a slow motion movie, with flecks of dust twirling through the air in a leisurely vector towards the other end of the parking garage. But he saw her, leading the charge with her staff, contrails of air rippling down its length, down her arm, and over her shoulder.

Ayabe didn't even try and block it, instead stepping out of the path of destruction in the hopes of a favorable counter attack. She was smiling (actually smiling!) as she passed him, and as he attempted to hit her exposed side with a full power _Hiraishin Kaizai Satsu_, she twirled like a drill bit, deflecting his hand. He nearly lost his balance from the abrupt and unexpected counter, and as he regained his footing, he saw the tip of her staff impact one of the reinforced concrete pillars that held up the roof.

He'd expected it to be destroyed, but to his surprise, there wasn't any damage at all. It was then that he saw her leg, and her right foot flat against the pillar – or rather, buried two or three inches in the solid concrete. He frowned: the woman had power and control in generous amounts.

"Who are you?" he asked, hiding the fear in his voice. "Who the hell are you people?"

The woman effortlessly jerked her foot out of the impression it had made. Behind Ayabe, the man moved stealthily, masking his _ki_ perfectly. They circled him like wild dogs waiting to strike.

"We are… exemplars," the man said, flexing the dexterous fingers he wielded like scalpels.

"Of the future," the woman finished her companion's sentence. "We're going to open your eyes, Ayabe-san. Through us, the best of you shall survive… eternally."

-----

Noriko Yasuda waited as the two men read over the report's conclusion, each of them taking extra time to absorb the information on the last page. She had a copy of the news on her desk as well, summed up in a short three pages. After reading it herself, she had placed the papers down on her desk with the delicacy and respect one would show to a poisonous serpent.

Captain Banks was the first to finish, going by how he folded the last page of the report back into place, and dropped it onto her desk. He ran a hand over his bald head, back and then forward, an anxious motion carried over from his younger days when he'd had a full head of hair. Next to him, Captain Ben-Solomon also finished and put the report down, his face calm and neutral.

"I am expecting a response from Andermatt by tomorrow," Noriko began. "However, I doubt they'll contribute anything but a confirmation of what we've already discovered."

"Well, at least they're not being very subtle," Banks spoke up and made an amused huff. "Tearing apart and leveling a parking garage? This isn't normal for a Trenchard."

"You're right. It isn't normal," Ben-Solomon interrupted. "But the genetic tests confirm it. Not just one, but two of the damn things."

"I've made the proper arrangements with local law enforcement to try and track down Mr. Ayabe, but like with the other abductees the last week, it is doubtful that they will be found." The UNETCO Commander frowned, and leaned back in her chair, steepling her fingers over her stomach. "We will have to intervene independently if this continues. It isn't just these two Trenchards… there was a van seen leaving the area. The records in the police database have been tampered with. There is a human front at work, and it is starting to irritate me."

She tapped her thumbs together, contemplating her response to the report.

"The Head Office is concerned," she thought out loud, "They'll want a response soon after Andermatt's reply. This whole situation with the Trenchards is their fault, after all."

"You don't think things were moving in that direction already?" Banks asked, and then amended his statement. "Still, if nothing else, it made the problem more endemic."

"Shutting down Sirius here in Japan will be messy without going through the locals," Ben-Solomon, a counter-intelligence and HUMINT man from his days in _Shin Bet_, knew the most about what his commanding officer was proposing. "We'll have to tip toe around Section Seven of the Charter."

"That has been a problem in the past," Noriko agreed, but she didn't sound altogether too worried. "Skirting around Section Seven has normally left us vulnerable, but with a few of our new recruits…" She trailed off.

"Oh ho!" Banks interjected with a grin. "She's right! Even following Section Seven by the letter, they'd be at the top of their game."

"It is an interesting idea," Ben-Solomon seconded. "But will they go along with it?"

"I was hoping you two could offer some insights into that," Noriko answered, looking from one Captain to the other. "We're holding a First Kill Night for both of the teams tonight, as you know. I'd like you, and the other mentors, to flesh out how open to the concept the recruits are. Be casual about it."

The two men exchanged looks and nodded.

"Ma'am," Banks added, changing the topic slightly. "How much should we tell them about these Trenchards? Especially the male, who we have positively identified… As Acting Lieutenants for their squads, they'll have clearance high enough to know the truth."

"Tomorrow," Noriko responded quickly, having already given it some thought. "They worked hard yesterday… or this morning. Even caught an Ethereal without losing a single man or woman. Let them enjoy tonight. They've earned it."

As the two men agreed, saluted, and eventually left, Noriko Yasuda smiled to herself. Two active Trenchards running around Japan meant trouble, not just for XCOM, but for all the exceptional martial artist types in the country. At the same time, it could be seen as a real opportunity. She'd been meaning to crack down on the alien-sympathetic locals but lacked the manpower to make the risk worth the effort.

The Nerima Crew and their martial arts abilities had immediately struck her as the solution to that problem. As valuable as they could be against the aliens, they would be put to even better use against the human collaborators who hid under the protection of the UNETCO Charter and Section Seven. With those leeches taken care of, and the alien base in East Asia identified (or better yet: put to the torch), then things would be one step closer to Operation Aloadae.

For years, the war had raged in Earth.

It was high past time the aliens got a taste of it on their home turf.


	27. Through Hell Barefoot III

-----

Nabiki Tendo had been to many parties before, but never anything like this. It wasn't that it was wild, because it definitely wasn't, it was the food. Even here in Japan, Americans and their cousins in the British Commonwealth made up a disproportionate percentage of the UNETCO population. When they got together to barbeque, it was a sight to behold. The smell of charcoal and smoked meat filled the air, tantalizing her nose and teasing her taste buds with a chorus of potential meals.

She had been told that it was tradition to celebrate a recruit's first victory in the field with an open air barbeque, giving everyone at the base a chance to break the monotony of work, and reacquaint themselves with the non-recycled air outside their mountain lairs. It also seemed to be an opportunity for rivalries to re-emerge, as the day's cooks weren't the professional chefs who worked in the base. The night's hosts were ground pounders and pilots, showcasing local favorites from their respective homes.

Most people came and went, finding time for dinner between their work shifts. Only the two new squads that had returned triumphant the day before, and their family members, had the evening off. At most, twenty or twenty five people were outside at any one time, eating and talking, drinking and acting like normal people on a holiday or weekend. It wasn't the sort of thing she'd expected to occur outside the secret mountain base of an alien fighting international organization.

"All this food, and you try and steal mine?"

"Quit whining boy! Your plate happened to be closer than the grill."

"I earned this food! What have you been doing lately, you old panda!"

"I've been working! Who says I haven't? Show your father some respect!"

"Genma! Behave yourself! Ranma! Don't you dare punt your father!"

"Yes, dear." "Yes mom."

Nabiki rolled her eyes, but couldn't help but smile at the three Saotomes. It was good to see them together, the only full family present at the entire affair. It almost made her forget how few people she really knew here, even among the Nerima locals. In high school and in college, she'd had an easy time joining a clique of friends, but here (being so young, and so under qualified) she'd found a much harder time fitting in. And when she'd looked to the Nerimites, she'd been forced to realize that they weren't her friends, they were Ranma's and Akane's.

She just didn't know them.

Ukyou and Shampoo, who she had known of since they'd first showed up, Nabiki had only a surface familiarity with. Both were typically orbiting Ranma and by extension the Saotome clan, but for once neither had any food to hook their would-be fiancé with. Instead they settled for sitting nearby, watching him and each other (like hawks), and occasionally hoping to interject themselves in whatever conversation Ranma was engaged in.

Akane and Kasumi were talking to the man who had prepared and served the slow cooked beef brisket that, Nabiki had to admit, had ended up incredibly good. The middle Tendo daughter doubted that her younger sister would have much luck replicating even the most basic grilled side of chicken or oversized hamburger, but if Kasumi found more recipes to add to her repertoire, then the world could only be a happier and tastier place. There was certainly enough variety in foodstuffs to give her some new ideas: wet ribs, dry ribs, kabobs, crocodile and cleaned prawn, pork chops and chickens – in strips, pieces and all the varied partitions.

It was too bad Nabiki preferred eating over cooking. She actually wasn't much better than Akane in the kitchen, but that wasn't a fact she was especially keen on others learning. Which was, again, the problem. When you tended to blackmail people, they weren't likely to become more than casual conspirators and hangers on, much less real friends. That was normally enough for her, but with the pressures of actual work she was starting to feel… isolated, even with her sisters and father close at hand.

She saw the new guy to their group, Ryu, sitting next to Mousse on a metal chair by a citronella lamp. Both had empty paper plates on the ground by their feet, what few bones that remained from their meals picked clean enough to impress a vulture. Ryu made a gesture with his hands that looked like an explosion, and laughed, and to Nabiki's slight surprise, the boy's Chinese companion smiled and chuckled, his shoulders moving enough to see.

They looked like friends.

They had only known each other for less than a month, and they already looked like friends. Nabiki felt a pang of jealousy, which was a most unwelcome and generally unfamiliar feeling for her. Further away, she saw Kuno, Konatsu, and two men she didn't know. Tatewaki was making a production, probably of what he had done on the mission the day before. Nabiki couldn't hear what he was saying, not over the din of a half dozen other conversations closer by, but she could guess that he was grossly exaggerating whatever it was he'd managed to accomplish (if anything). One of the men held up his hand, and interrupted with something, and they looked at Konatsu, who held up his hands and replied (probably in his normally modest and demure tone). Nabiki couldn't see Konatsu's face with his back to her, but Kuno and the other two guys were smiling.

Nabiki felt the urge to leave, but suppressed it as being immature and foolish.

She wasn't anti-social, and her conversational skills sure as hell put someone like Kuno or Mousse to shame. Or so she had always assumed. Kuno hadn't had many friends (just lackeys and followers) back in high school, and Mousse had always been a loner. Even Ranma, while he had been popular as a student who stood up to teachers like Hinako and the hated insane principal, seemed to have preferred to hang out with guys who wanted to beat him into a pulp over guys who wanted to go to the mall or whatever it was that boys did in their free time. Probably ogle all those pictures of Ranma-chan she sold to them.

Nabiki giggled at that, the thought cheering her up momentarily. She didn't want to have to hang around with her sisters, listening in on culinary tips she didn't care about and never intended to use (or misuse in Akane's case). She didn't want to revolve around Ranma, his fiancés, and the denigrating hoops they jumped through to get his attention. Listening to that for thirty minutes would rot her brain.

Injecting herself into the other conversations going on didn't look any more promising, however. The population was mostly male, but they were all much older than her, and she doubted the tricks she'd developed to work on high school boys and college freshmen would be too helpful in breaking them away from their personal conversations about fighting unspeakable menaces, and classified missions, and what it was like to pilot a flying saucer against aliens.

Damnit, she was bored. She wanted to talk to someone, hang out, have fun, and forget that tomorrow she had to crunch numbers for a living. The food and drink were incredible, like nothing she'd had before, but the company left something to be desired. For her at least. Finally, she found the one person she knew would be off brooding by himself. Now would be as good a time as any to squeeze a few secrets out of the lost boy (not for blackmail purposes, she reminded herself, but because it was always useful to have a network of useful contacts and insiders).

Ryouga sat in a steel chair, the front legs in the sir, the back propped against a tree, letting him stare upwards at the star lit night sky. He still had food on his plate, but despite it being on the ground, the faithful Hibiki dog Shirokuro contented herself with staring at it instead of stealing the tidbits. Nabiki picked up an unoccupied chair, and put it down next to him with just enough of a production to be sure he'd noticed.

"Hey," she offered, when he didn't make the first attempt at conversation.

Ryouga tilted his head, taking his eyes from the sky to briefly confirm that it was her. She smiled, putting on a friendly front, and watched his eyes to see if they dipped down a bit to her neckline. She wasn't wearing anything risqué, but she knew her violet tube top hugged her figure well enough to get the job done.

Over the years, she'd learned how looking good was as intimidating as looking mean, and generally much more effective at getting what you wanted. As the saying went, you could get more with a kind word and a gun, than just a gun. Ryouga's eyes didn't linger on her for more than a half second, before he went back to craning his neck at the palette of stars.

It was too quick to draw any conclusions from.

"Nabiki," he said, and closed his eyes.

"Wow, don't gush all over me, now!" She pouted, and saw a trace of a smile cross his face.

"You know," she continued. "Most guys would be happy if a cute girl came over and showed him some attention."

He nodded imperceptibly. "So what can I help you with, Nabiki?"

"You can quit acting like a social pariah and talk to me." She kicked him gently on the ankle. "Come on! Don't make me wring a human conversation out of you."

The front legs of his chair came down, as he sat straight up and picked up a white can of Sapporo beer. They were all underage, except Kuno who had just turned twenty a month and a half ago, but no one seemed to care. She supposed that since UNETCO properties were like international zones, the drinking age was 16 or 18, not that it mattered when it came to privately owned residences. The legal age was more about buying alcohol than drinking it.

"Alright, what do you want to talk about?" He asked, as he picked a piece of meat from his plate, and gave it to Shirokuro. The dog plucked it from his fingers with her front teeth, and Ryouga wiped the digits off on his dark blue jeans.

"I dunno," Nibiki replied, casually, and took a sip from her own now-lukewarm can of beer. She was the sort who nursed her drink, never totally willing to give into an excess that could impair her thinking. That and she'd learned in her senior year of high school that she had a poor tolerance for the stuff.

"What were you thinking about just now?" She asked, and noted how Ryouga looked away from her, and down to his dog who had gone back to staring at his plate.

"Nothing," he insisted, and didn't elaborate.

"Are you telling me that your mind was completely blank? Totally devoid of all thought?" She smirked, but didn't immediately draw an objection. "I guess if Ranma were here, he'd probably back up your statement without hesitation."

Ryouga made a scoffing sound, and shook his head, finally giving up the point.

"I was just… thinking about something I'd heard," he finally answered.

"Work?" Nabiki asked.

"Yeah. Work." He looked up at her, and went back to sitting back-straight in his chair. "Sorry. I can't talk about it."

"I know," Nabiki replied, and nibbled on a grilled shrimp, holding it by the tail. When she was done, she shook her head. "Secrets. You guys always lived in your own little martial arts world, but everything now seems to be a big national secret."

"Martial artists are just people… like soldiers or police. They're men and women who fight and live at the edge of their skills." Nabiki listened, surprised to hear him talk about his lifestyle. While it hadn't been hard learning superficial details about the Nerima martial artists, their personal motivations and thoughts were something they all kept to themselves.

Ryouga smiled sadly, looking down at the drink cradled in his lap. "No one ever reveals their true self to others. Even the ones they love."

Then, enigmatically, his pensive mood darkened at what he had just said.

"I don't know about that," Nabiki said, thinking about it for a second. "Ranma's pretty transparent, his poker face is proof enough of that, and it was never hard to see how you felt about people. Especially Akane."

"Have you ever been in a do or die situation, Nabiki?" he asked.

Kinnosuke immediately came to mind, and she had to nod. "Yeah. I have."

"Then you know your 'real self,'" he replied, rather cryptically, but Nabiki did know. She knew that feeling of fear and excitement and challenge. A part of you did retreat into itself, for protection, for security – it was that clear part of your mind that you relied on in a clutch moment, devoid of hesitation or fear or human doubt.

It was that part of her that was willing to sacrifice anything, or everything, for victory and pride. It had been the part of her that let her defy death, or deal death, in her thrift duel with Kinnosuke. He could have been killed, and so could she, and for what? Not to save the Dojo, but to preserve that true identity that existed deep within her. She looked over her shoulder at Ranma and Ukyou and Shampoo, at Mousse and Ryu, at Kuno and Konatsu.

When she faced Ryouga again, she wasn't sure what to say.

The lost boy just took another sip from his Sapporo Yebisu. Hoping to pick up on a lighter topic of conversation, Nabiki pointed at the can. "You ever been there?"

"Where?" He stared at the label. " Sapporo or Ebisu?"

"Either one." Nabiki smiled; glad to move on to talk about travel and familiar and foreign places. She'd always wanted to get out and see the world, and she'd always been intrigued by how Akane and Ranma described how their erstwhile friend ended up in strange places and spent his life on the road. Ranma in particular had something of a romanticized view of wandering around and having adventures, and she suspected the pigtailed boy sort of envied Ryouga for being able to go off on his own. Ranma had been to a great many places himself, but always following in the footsteps of his father.

"Yeah," Ryouga said and grunted in a displeased way. "I've been through them both."

"And?" Nabiki pressed, nudging him with her foot. "Come on, Hibiki! Out with it! I've been to Ebisu a few times myself, but not Sapporo. Did you go for the Snow Festival?"

Ryouga sighed. "I didn't go there on purpose. I was… I had taken a wrong direction somewhere. When I blasted out of the ground I accidentally knocked over some guy's ice sculpture. Of course he attacked me on sight."

Nabiki groaned. "Let me guess: Martial Arts Ice Sculpture?"

"Oh! You've heard of them, then?" Ryouga asked, and Nabiki resisted the urge to face fault in the ground. Why did everything involve martial arts with these people!

"Well," Ryouga continued his story, more confident now about telling it to someone he assumed knew about the esoteric and useless martial art he'd encountered. "After I beat the guy up a little and apologized to him, I learned that there were these two schools of Martial Arts Ice Sculpture: the Kanda Style and the Ueda Style. The guy I'd run into was the heir to the Kanda Style, and he explained that he was training to beat the heir to the Ueda Style and impress this girl he wanted to propose to."

"It wasn't really my business, so I'd tried to leave, but it being a snow festival it was only a matter of time before I got splashed and…" Ryouga paused, as if he'd swallowed his tongue.

"And?" Nabiki prompted.

"And…" Ryouga coughed, and resumed his story. "When I went to towel off, I ran into Eri Sanzo, who of course happened to be the girl the other guy was in love with. She sort of filled me in on what was happening from her point of view. Turns out her grandfather had trained the founders of the two other schools, and that this year one of them was going to gain legitimacy by beating the other, and marrying her into their family. I can't say it isn't a story I haven't heard before."

"Typical," Nabiki grumbled, disgusted by the notion, as familiar as it was to the often less than scrupulous practitioners of the Anything Goes Style, of which her father was a proud member. "Which of them 'won,' her?"

"Well, after she expressed to me how she didn't want to marry either of them, I couldn't just walk away," Ryouga said with a resigned sigh. "So she taught me what she knew of their Art, and I got involved and beat the two guys in a duel, getting them to postpone deciding which was the 'true school' for another generation. By then I figure it'll be someone else's problem, and Eri seemed happy, so it ended well enough."

"It seems like you left a lot of that story out just now," Nabiki observed, and Ryouga blushed a bit, though at what she could only guess. "What was this Eri girl like? Was she cute?"

"She was… very pretty," he replied, reminiscing. "Very nice. She lived in this palace of ice and snow. It was pretty amazing."

"Did you like her?" Nabiki asked teasingly.

"I don't like everyone I help out, Nabiki." He looked her right in the eyes for a second, and she wondered if he was referring to her specifically. To her surprise, she found that the thought hurt.

"You need to lighten up, Ryo-baby," she quickly replied, sounding playful to cover up any doubt or insecurity that may have been in her voice. "Frowning guys aren't as attractive as ones that smile."

Ryouga did smile at that, and went back to staring at his drink. "Like I think about those sorts of things…"

"You should," Nabiki added, craning her neck to try and see his face. "You have a nice smile, on the rare occasions it shows up."

She'd expected a response from him, positive or negative, but he didn't make any that she could see. For a few seconds, she wondered if she'd embarrassed him (good!) or if he'd felt insulted. Ryouga wasn't just easily depressed, from what she'd seen and heard around the time of that _Shishi Hokoudan_ duel he'd had with Ranma, he was downright miserable. He'd lived his life with no family, few if any friends, a humiliating curse, and the misfortune of falling for a girl in love with his rival. Did she sound condescending, implying that he should smile more often?

Really, what did he have to smile _about_?

"Is there anything you want to talk about, Ryouga?" She asked, sensing he had something in the back of his mind that he did want to talk about with someone, but that fear or some other emotion was keeping it in check. Nabiki would have liked to be someone he could confide in, if only to pay him back for saving them when they'd been abducted. She knew he didn't trust her, and she also knew that while he'd probably heard horror stories about her from the others, she had a relatively clean conscience when it came to him.

"Ryouga?" She asked again.

"No," he muttered, and then repeated more loudly. "No. I'd rather not talk about it… it's either too stupid to mention, or… or too horrible to unburden."

"Ooh," Nabiki cooed. "Now saying something like that, you've sparked my curiosity!"

Ryouga muttered something under his breath, and took a long drag from his drink, finishing it off. He seemed to be deep in thought about whatever it was that bothered him so much, and Nabiki couldn't help but wonder what it was. If this had been Nerima, back in the day, she'd have assumed it was a problem relating to Akane or Ranma (or both), but here and now, she suspected it was his work. He was connecting something he'd seen to something he'd heard, and she could see the dark suspicion just beneath the surface of his face.

"Nabiki," he finally said, shaking the empty can in his right hand. "Do you think you can find out where certain pieces of equipment are shipped, inside or outside the base?"

Her work really wasn't something she wanted to talk about, but he did seem to be heading somewhere potentially interesting. And Nabiki Tendo loved 'interesting;' the price of being almost perpetually bored and unchallenged by one's peers.

"Requisitions orders all come through our department, so if it enters or leaves the base, it is somewhere in our files," she replied, and wondered if he knew the scope and scale of UNETCO record keeping. It helped that they had computers generations beyond state of the art. "What are you looking for?"

He nodded, and took a deep breath. "If you can… I'd like to know where the human remains recovered last night are taken. Whether they leave the base, stay here, or get shipped to another base somewhere. Anything."

Nabiki made a sour face. "Human remains? You mean like the people we saw before…?"

"Yeah," Ryouga answered grimly. "That ship was an Abductor, and the one we took out was a Harvester. Maybe even the one that… that I'm _thinking_ about."

"I'm not normally one to ask," Nabiki said, but asked anyway. "But is this going to get me in trouble?"

"I don't think so," Ryouga replied and then added. "You don't have to do it if you get a bad feeling or something. I mean, you… I was just asking, so…"

"It's ok," she assured him, wearing a friendly smile. "I'll see what I can do. But in return, I do want you to share anything you find out or suspect. Off the record, of course."

"Deal." Ryouga seemed glad to share just a fraction of what had been bothering him with someone else. Nabiki nursed her drink again, mentally going over how she was going to do what she'd agreed to look into. Her security clearance was about the lowest there was, except for whatever Kasumi and the other really low level civilians had, and she wasn't sure that she could have access to that sort of information. However, she had always been rather nosy, and the trill of playing semi-harmless snoop would be an exciting escape from what passed for normal.

Lying quietly on the ground, Shirokuro picked her head up off her crossed paws, and looked up at her master. Ryouga patted her gently, his hand cupping one of her ears, before picking up his plate, and sliding two pieces of meat off it onto the ground. Shirokuro quickly stretched out her neck, and deftly appropriated the pieces with her tongue, eating the morsels as swiftly as possible.

"I'm surprised you didn't clean you plate like all the other crazy martial artists here," Nabiki observed. By the time she'd finished the sentence, Shirokuro was done eating and looking for more.

"I can't eat much," Ryouga began to explain, resting the plate on his left leg. "During the mission, I took a hit to the abdomen."

Nabiki's eyebrows rose at that. "You got shot?"

"It was…" he seemed to mull over how much to tell her, before relenting. He looked up at her, and she knew he was skirting the edge of what she should and should not know. "One of the aliens we ran into was a telekinetic. It hit me with an attack called a _Giesteslanze_, or Mental Lance. It goes right through armor, right through the body… my ki protected me, kept it from punching a hole clear through me, but there was still some internal damage."

"Are you ok?" Nabiki asked, and she saw that the concern in her voice had caught him off guard. "Was it one of those… Sectoids we ran into before?"

"I won't let just that kill me," Ryouga said, in a somewhat sinister tone. "And it wasn't a Sectoid, no. What we caught is classified two levels above your clearance, but process of elimination makes it obvious what it was."

"Ethereal," Nabiki whispered. Being naturally curious, she'd taken the first opportunity to learn as much as she could about the aliens they were protecting the Earth from. The level of information she had available to her was limited, but she had been privy to the fact that only command caste Sectoids and Ethereals used mental attacks. Of the two, Ethereals were by far the most dangerous.

"I won't confirm or deny it," Ryouga answered, all but saying she had guessed correctly. "But I am getting another drink."

Slowly standing up, he started towards a table next to one of the smoking Barbeque grills, beneath which a duo of coolers waited for the thirsty to dig out their beverage of choice from among a sea of salty ice water. It was only about twenty feet away over flat, clear terrain, so it wasn't likely he'd get lost heading there or back. Shirokuro didn't test fate, and followed close by him, using her flank to make sure he didn't stray.

"Dog walks man," Nabiki saluted the loyal creature that had devoted herself to keeping a Hibiki from his natural state of lost-ness. It must have been a trying life indeed, even for man's best friend. Or maybe, as she thought about it, it was little removed from a Seeing Eye dog leading her blind master around and keeping him safe from a condition he had no control over.

Taking a bit more of a drink from her beer than usual, she wondered if it would really be profitable to try and play the part of a friend to the lost boy. His proposition had certainly made him a bit more interesting in her eyes, and he must've had a ton of strange stories from his travels over the years. He was polite, and nice, but with a suitably amusing vicious streak which she could appreciate. Yes, and it was that vicious streak that would take him places in UNETCO.

Ranma, for all his strengths, was not very vicious. While that was to the pigtailed boy's benefit in normal society, it would limit him here. Ryouga, on the other hand, would walk through Hell barefoot… not for his friends, not for his family, not for love or freedom. No.

He'd do it for hate.

He'd do it for revenge.

Some men, to fight monsters, became shining knights or noble samurai, finding comfort and cause in their virtue. Others, like Ryouga, became bigger monsters. Those were ambitious men, powerful men; self-destructive men. She knew the kind, and found them both fascinating and incredibly exciting. Men like that could be attached to by cunning and intelligent partners; at least until they burned themselves out, at which time those partners were often in a position to take advantage of the situation.

Yes, he could be a profitable friend to have.

"Ryouga," Nabiki spoke up as he walked back to his chair. "Ranma told me once that you've been to Russia, right?"

"Yeah." The lost boy sat down, and eased into a comfortable position, more relaxed around her than she could remember before. "I'd been heading for Xining at the time to get food for the guys before we hit Phoenix Mountain, and before I knew it… there I was in the shadow of Saint Basil's Cathedral."

Nabiki took another draught from her drink and grinned at him.

"Tell me _all_ about it."

-----

-----

Well, there's another chapter. "Trenchard" and "Andermatt" are both references to/from the X-COM novel, by the way. I hope those still reading are enjoying TRTC, even though I know it has been very heavy on the Ranma characters and martial arts stuff, and perhaps not as much into the XCOM scifi as some would prefer. I'm trying to cover both bases of the crossover.


	28. Ghost Wire I

The year is 2005. For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. Two new missions take the Nerima gang back to Tokyo, where an alien-human conspiracy seems to have taken root. Ranma begins to make an effort to clear up his fiancé situation and streamline his team, Konatsu finds an unlikely source of advice, and Ryouga and Nabiki meet to discuss recent revelations.

* * *

**The Road To Cydonia**  
Chapter X  
_Ghost Wire_

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

The entire facility was called a "Psi Lab" but the name was somewhat misleading. Less than a third of the space was really devoted to pure research, the majority being given the appropriate label of "Psionic Gym." It was in this section that the UNETCO staff honed their mental skills and reinforced their sanity. In all XCOM bases it was located adjacent to the Mind Shield, and another role it played was to assist in monitoring and keeping that essential device functional. No one cared for a repeat of what had happened at Morelbach, XCOM's first European base, and the only major facility to fall to the Enemy. 

There were safe areas designated for Psionic and Physiological Therapy, Mental Isolation, Telekinetic Development and Experimentation, and general Psionic Exercise and Evaluation. This last area was the largest and (arguably) the most important. The psionic capable aliens, the Ethereals and Sectoids, both possessed sensory organs called _amupllae psionic_, which allowed them to manifest their formidable powers. Human beings were fortunate enough to possess a corresponding set of neural canals, but far denser and smaller in size. Long term research with captured aliens proved that they had both a stable level of psionic power and psionic projection, which neither atrophied or improved with time and practice.

Humans, however, need to practice exhaustively before they were capable of mimicking substantial psionic projection, even with the external aid of a PsiAmp. An alien would be born (more accurately: cloned or manufactured) with the level of psionic ability it would die with. A human started out much weaker, but with practice, and the aid of technology, could eventually rival or even surpass the most powerful Ethereal. Or so Ranma had been informed in the Introduction to Psionics Video Presentation.

In truth, he wasn't so sure of the claim.

Ryouga had warned him about psionic attacks, and even told him how the aliens had easily been able to paralyze him before, when they attacked the Unryu farm. Ranma had seen his _Moko Takabisha_, a blast of _ki_ he'd assumed could only be countered by a similar attack, easily deflected by a command caste Sectoid. He'd had a wealth of information on the enemy placed at his fingertips, but he'd still been shocked when they're reviewed the mission recordings, and seen what the Ethereal had done to the lost boy and the others.

When he'd arrived in the Psi Gym and looked around, he'd been reminded of what his mentor had told him. The next war, he had explained (assuming the aliens would eventually be destroyed and that humans would go back to killing each other) wouldn't just be fought with weapons and information to destroy bodies and morale. It would be a war of minds, where a small elite squad with the aid of psionics could engage and defeat enemies far out of proportion with respect to numbers, technology, or even determination.

Ranma had been quick to mandate two hours every day of Psionic Training for everyone in his Squad.

"We're gonna start from scratch," he'd said.

That had included himself. He'd been tempted to jump right into trying out telekinetics or PsiAmp familiarity, but that was high level stuff. To his chagrin, it was probably too high level for him at the moment to get much out of. So: he would work his way up, like with any martial art. For most personnel, "mental hardening" was as far as their development went, but Ranma was confident his group would gain a lot from even that. Though he hadn't suggested it to the others, he was sure that basic psionic practice would help them develop their _ki_ as well.

Most of the training took the form of games, which shouldn't have surprised him. The best training always found a way to make repetitive behavior entertaining. He sat in a booth facing a digital screen, and saw an L-shaped block appear in the middle of the display. Above and below the block, a large collection of its fellows, of many shapes and sizes, were clustered tightly together. The game itself was a modified sort of Tetris, but controlled mentally rather than with a controller. Unlike in Tetris, his goal was to assemble as many complete solid lines as possible, as the blocks piled up.

However, he had to do so while fighting for control over the block with his opponent. One block appeared at a time; sometimes his opponent wanted it, and it wasn't worth fighting over, sometimes his opponent wanted it, and it was worth the effort to frustrate his efforts by messing with the block's orientation at the last second (especially when he was about to complete a full line). Sometimes they both wanted it, and it would go back and forth before one of them wrested control and exhausted or tired out the other. Conserving mental strength was essential, and so was planning and dealing with the element of randomity produced by not knowing what shape of block would appear next.

He wasn't very good at it yet (he tended to over rotate pieces or lose control of them when he sensed an opponent's mental control over it lessen), and that was a little frustrating, but he'd been told that his progress was remarkable. He'd been keeping tabs on the rest of his team, too, and while it was a little difficult to gauge progress when all the other Psi Gym regulars were much more experienced than they were, he'd noticed a competitive streak developing between them.

Ranma's control over one of the blocks slipped, and his opponent quickly seized it and sent it flying to his ever growing pile that descended from the top of the screen (having played many times, he'd learned that each person saw themselves as the 'bottom' screen, for visualization purposes). The 'competitive streak' among two of his team mates in particular was one of the reasons he wanted to take a break and talk to his opponent once they were finished with this third round. As the match drew to a close, he began to get more and more desperate, trying to rapidly build up another row or two before his opponent finished.

He came close to completing another full row before his control slipped and his haste screwed him over. The 'Z' shaped block had gotten wedged into the space next to where it should have gone, and it was preventing any other piece from managing to get into the spot. In a minute, it was over. He'd managed to build up four complete rows to his opponent's eighteen.

The phrase "curb stomp" came to mind.

He heard movement from the booth opposite his, and swiveled in his chair before getting back up. Captain Banks wasn't as quick to leave the chair, pushing himself up with his hands firmly on the armrests, and rubbing the back of his neck. The American was a tall man, just over six feet two inches, and he'd made his thoughts about 'small chairs with no headrests' well known.

"Good game, Ranma," he said, and offered his hand. Ranma was still a little unused to shaking hands when meeting someone new, much less casually doing it after a friendly game, but he didn't hesitate more than a second. Also a little strange was the lack of formality the man exhibited or expected; it wasn't as if Ranma was the most polite person when it came to authority figures, but it would have felt odd addressing someone he had no reason not to respect, who was his senior officer and mentor, without a proper honorific. He would have preferred using the Japanese, but English would have to do.

"Thank you, sir. Captain…" Ranma did hesitate, not used to asking for the opinions of others in personal matters. "Captain, if you've got a few minutes, I'd like to ask your advice about something."

"Well, that is why I'm here," Banks motioned with his head for Ranma to follow him somewhere else, and the two walked over to a small lounge area separated from the Psi Gym by a glass wall. There was a large snack machine, and a one with drinks, the latter Japanese and the former American.

"You did seem a little distracted today…" Banks observed, pressing the button on the vending machine for a bag of pretzels.

"So what's on your mind?" He asked and smiled, amused by his play on words.

"Well," Ranma began. "I've been told that there is some… concern about Shampoo and Ukyou and their behavior."

Banks chuckled as he popped open the bag, and fished inside for one of the mini-snacks. "The Lieutenant Commander chewed you out about that, eh?"

"That's an understatement," Ranma grumbled. "I mean: I don't see why she's on my case about them!"

"Ranma, listen." Captain Banks sighed, and paused before putting an especially salted pretzel in his mouth. "You're their commanding officer, so it's your responsibility. That's the way the chain of command works."

"But…!" Ranma bit back an attempt to turn the conversation into an argument. It hadn't worked when he'd started up with Commander Yasuda, and it doubted it would work now. He just didn't get why he was responsible for what Shampoo or Ukyou said and did. He understood that he was their leader, sort of like how Genma had been when his father had supervised his training, but he just couldn't wrap his head around how that evolved into him getting in trouble for what other people did. His old man certainly hadn't tried to take responsibility for when he son had screwed things up, and Ranma hated getting blamed for things that were his father's fault. A man (or woman) took responsibility for themselves, in his opinion.

"Ok, so what should I do about it?" Ranma asked, finally. "They've always been like that with each other, ya know, and I think it's better for their training to have a rival. I mean, it worked for me and Ryouga. Ya need someone to test yourself against!"

"There's a certain truth to that, yes. A healthy rivalry can be a good motivator," Banks agreed, and took a seat in a black fold out chair. "And I can't say I'm really familiar with what's going on between those two, but it seems to me like there's more to this than just a competition to be the best, or to get a promotion or something. Like this thing about them thinking they're your fiancé…?"

"That's… it's complicated," Ranma explained (badly).

"Well, you're going to have to make it less complicated. And soon." Banks popped a pretzel in his mouth, but kept talking anyway between chews. "I understand y'all are friends, or at least acquaintances or something, but when on duty they're not your friends; they're your soldiers, and they're UNETCO's soldiers, too."

Ranma frowned. That wasn't what he'd wanted to hear.

"You're a smart guy," Banks continued, taking a second to make sure he didn't use the word 'kid.' "I think you know what you've got to do; you just don't want to do it."

"You don't know what its like," Ranma replied, and ran his right hand through his thick hair, contemplating what he'd have to say and do. "They'll… they'll cry, and… and beg, and they'll hate me. Plus, there's the family honor at stake…"

"Shit happens. Deal with it," Banks interrupted, and then softened his tone. "They're adults, Ranma, and so are you. You can't make everyone happy, and you can't keep things going like they have. They'll respect your decision, whatever it is, and get back to work."

"This – all this," he said and gestured to the base around them. "…is bigger than them. Bigger than me, or you, or your family honor. And if you think I'm wrong, if this responsibility isn't your cup of tea, then you'd better tell me now so I can get to work on those papers shipping you out."

Ranma sighed loudly, signaling his resignation to the inevitable. "This is all my father's fault, you know."

Banks replied in a manner Ranma had never expected.

"I'm sorry to hear that," he said, simply. "But I know you won't repeat his mistakes, will you?"

Ranma opened his mouth to answer in the affirmative, but found that he wasn't sure he could make that kind of promise. He'd made his share of Genma-esque mistakes in the past, stealing food from any number of people and causing trouble for everyone months or years later. He didn't normally dwell on it, and he tried to set things right when they came back to bite him on the ass, but it just wasn't in his nature to worry too much about the future or the past. It got him in trouble, but it was just second nature.

While he was thinking over how, or whether, he should answer, Captain Banks stood up and walked past him.

"I gotta get going," he explained, and patted Ranma on the shoulder. "Good luck, soldier."

Ranma watched him go, and wished he could've honestly said 'yes.'

* * *

Konatsu noticed it right away. 

Something was bothering her, he could see it in the way she walked and the way she trained. In the months he had gotten to study her, to know her, he had noticed how talking to her father on the phone, how coming back from school sometimes, how confronting the truth, how all these things could drag out the old her. When those times came he'd learned not to try and cheer her up, instead focusing on being quiet, busy, and unobtrusive. Ukyou Kuonji did not take advice or anything that struck her as being grounded in pity very well.

Still, he wished he knew how to make her feel better. Talking had never really worked before, and they weren't in the store, so he couldn't try and impress her by working extra hard. It had been three days since the last mission, and Ukyou's mood had visibly shifted from brooding to pensive. Almost certainly it was caused by what had happened during the mission when that alien had mentally attacked her. Unfortunately, he hadn't asked Mousse or Ryu what they had experienced, not feeling justified in prying into their personal business, so he could only imagine what Ukyou had endured.

He was feeling a bit more self assured after having gone through the mission intact, and when the others had commented positively on his performance, he'd swelled with pride. But Ukyou had not been one of those people to give him attention, and she was the one he most wanted praise and respect from. If only he had some way to cheer her up then maybe, just maybe…

"Oh, Ukyou-sama…" Konatsu imagined a spotlight representing her, shining down on him, lighting up the darkness of his life from before he'd met her. "What do I have to do to earn your trust? Your love?"

"There must be something wrong with the male Japanese gene pool."

"Eep!" Konatsu jumped, literally, out of his daydream and remembered where he was. The cafeteria was mostly empty, except for a handful of people he didn't know (and who were currently staring at him like he was crazy). The sole exception was Shampoo, who had appeared out of no where with a tray loaded up with stir fried chicken, veggies, and a dark chocolate brownie.

Suddenly self conscious, the legendary male kunoichi (a contradiction in terms in all but his mind) picked his foot up off the chair it had been dramatically posing on and quietly took his seat at the otherwise empty table. Fidgeting with his fingers, he watched as Shampoo sighed heavily and sat next to him. Apparently she preferred to sit next to a weirdo rather than be by herself, or with complete strangers.

Shampoo pulled her drink closer, but didn't drink from it before adding, "Then again, Mousse acts the same way." She shook her head sadly. "Stupid men."

"Sorry," Konatsu apologized, though it wasn't as if he had to. "I got a little carried away, I guess."

Shampoo grunted a reply, and started to eat. The only utensils available were metal forks and knives and spoons – western style – which had caused some of the new arrivals more trouble than others. Konatsu wasn't used to them, and neither was Shampoo, but Kuno, Ranma, Ryouga and Mousse were more worldly and didn't show any problems when they'd eaten together. Konatsu sometimes wondered about them. Despite living in Nerima for a good while, he didn't really know much about the other guys, and he always felt like the odd man out in their conversations.

"So, um," he spoke softly, and hoped Shampoo didn't just ignore him. "That sort of thing happens a lot, huh?"

She took the bait easily enough, putting down her fork. "You kidding? Ranma is fine, but the other men all act like love sick idiots. Lost boy used to be really bad, wandering around crying about Akane, being depressed in store, hugging telephone poles and accidentally breaking down walls. Stupid! Stick boy was no better, always running around and yelling about girl type Ranma and Akane. Mousse… Mousse was worst of them all. Always making stupid declarations, or trying to get me to go out with him, or trying to save me but instead saving a statue or something. Stupid, stupid Mousse."

"Oh," Konatsu replied, dumbly. Then, he thought of something that could actually help him out. "So, you like Ranma because he didn't act like that?"

Shampoo stared at him out of the corner of her eyes. "Shampoo… I mean I, love Ranma. I don't just 'like' him."

"Of course!" Konatsu smiled nervously, holding up his hands.

"And… it isn't as if I don't wish he acted like he loved me back," Shampoo admitted, after a few seconds of silent indecision. "He's always so… aloof and indifferent. I don't expect him to act like stupid Mousse or lost boy, but it would be nice if he…"

Shampoo shook her head. "No matter. Ranma is strong outsider male. The other traits aren't so important."

Ukyou had explained very clearly (and with no small amount of bias) about how Shampoo had ended up engaged to Ranma. Apparently, Ranma (in his girl form) had beaten her in a fight back in China, after his father had eaten the food Shampoo would have won. Amazon Law said that Shampoo had to kill an outsider woman who beat her, and she tracked Ranma and his father across China to Japan.

Once there, she'd discovered that 'girl type Ranma' was really a boy, and so she'd gone from trying to kill him to trying to marry him (as Amazon Law stated that outsider men who beat an Amazon in a fight have to marry into the tribe). As far as Konatsu knew, Ranma had never returned Shampoo's affections (except for one incident with emotion reversing jewelry).

Like almost everyone from Nerima, she was cursed to remain in a limbo of one sided affection. Konatsu couldn't help but compare himself to Mousse, who loved Shampoo, who in turn loved Ranma. Still, Konatsu thought of Ukyou as much more reasonable than Shampoo, and so he held out hope that he could turn the tables and get her to like him back. If only he could find out where the other boy went wrong in his pursuit of Shampoo, then it might shed some light on what he could do about Ukyou.

"But… Ranma isn't the only guy who would qualify as a strong outsider male, is he?" Konatsu asked, risking entry into dangerous waters. He didn't want to imply that Shampoo was weak or anything, just… weaker than most (or all) of the guys she associated with.

"Ranma is stronger than any of the others here," Shampoo stated, not getting angry. "He even beat Herb! And Saffron!"

"So if he lost to someone," Konatsu speculated. "You'd lost interest in him?"

"Of course not!" Shampoo rolled her eyes, as if she was talking down to a toddler or something. "Ranma has lost plenty of fights, but he always gets stronger and comes back to win. That is what makes him strong. That is why I love him."

"I see," Konatsu mumbled, thinking over what she'd said. "So girls like strong guys who don't give up when they lose to someone?"

"Exactly!" Shampoo exclaimed, giving him a firm nod. "It shows he is dedicated! Very good trait in a husband!"

"Interesting. Hmm…" The ninja pondered that for a minute while Shampoo went back to spearing her stir fry, holding her fork like a knife. What she had told him made sense. He wasn't sure why Ukyou liked Ranma so much. He'd always suspected it was because of the family honor thing, or maybe because he was a lone familiar face from her youth, or because she'd vilified (and idolized) him for so many years while she trained. But none of that explained the initial attraction that must have existed between them.

There was just one problem with it.

"Um, Shampoo?" Konatsu asked, catching her between slurps of her drink. "What you said before, doesn't that apply to Mousse, too?"

The Amazon girl released the straw between her lips, and closed her eyes sadly before nodding. "Mousse is very tenacious, yes. But it isn't the same."

"Oh," Konatsu said, and thought of what it could be. "Is it the glasses?"

Shampoo smirked, and shook her head. "There is more to it than that. Mousse isn't an outsider male. It isn't that I hate him… I just can't be with him like that. He knows it; too, he's just too stupid and stubborn to let things be."

That didn't really explain anything. "I'm not sure I understand…"

"I know you're trying to win over Ukyou, and anything that keeps that hussy away from my Ranma, I'll help out. So I'll tell you," Shampoo said, but spoke quietly so he had to lean a little closer to hear properly. "You know about the Amazon Laws about outsider men and women. If an outsider woman defeats an Amazon, that Amazon must kill her. If an outsider man defeats an Amazon, that Amazon must marry him."

Konatsu nodded.

"However, that does not mean that every Amazon marries an outsider," Shampoo continued candidly. "In fact, only the strongest Amazons fight outsider men. The weaker ones all marry in the Tribe. The strong Amazons are all from the Great Families."

"Like you?" he guessed.

"I happen to be from the oldest and strongest of all the families," Shampoo boasted with a wide grin. "Every woman from my family has married a strong outsider man. Strong men make the Great Families more powerful than the others and enforce Tribal Laws. Also important is that with outsider males, there are no commitments or connections with lesser families. You see?"

Contrary to what some might think Konatsu was not stupid. He had been trained to be a master shinobi and a tea house girl in the classical sense, and that meant he had to understand backroom politics for spying purposes. He understood what Shampoo had explained very well. These Great Families were a sort of aristocracy in the Amazon community, making themselves stronger and those under them weaker, and cutting their familial ties to that same underclass. The Amazon Laws probably kept the weaker women from leaving the village, or sent them out on suicidal vendettas against foreigner women, while the strong ones found stronger guys and married them. These men would have no connection or loyalty to the Amazons themselves except for their immediate family members.

"I do see," Konatsu replied, and added, "How did this system develop? Who wrote the Amazon Laws?"

"The Amazon Laws were all written by the founders of Tribe, over two thousand years ago," Shampoo answered, surprisingly forthcoming with the information. From the pride in her voice, he suspected she was happy someone was actually interested in her background for once. "Back then, there were Greek settlers in westernmost China, and they met up with the Old Amazons who lived in the area. Most of these became the Great Families."

"The Greeks wanted to marry into other Greek families from colonies nearby. This is where the Laws come from. Later, when barbarians took over the area, they moved further east. The tradition of Great Families marrying outside the Tribe continued, but over hundreds of years more and more husbands came from the east, instead of the south or west, so the Great Families eventually became mostly Chinese. A thousand years later, Old Amazons became Chinese Amazons."

"That's amazing!" Konatsu meant it, too. "So you're…what? Part Greek?"

"Greek, Han Chinese, Indian, Tibetan, Mongol, Japanese…" Shampoo flicked her violet colored hair and then pointed at her light brown left eye. "These aren't normal Chinese features, are they? Some Amazons even have blond hair and blue eyes."

"But enough about that!" Shampoo cut him off before he could say anything. Pointing at him with her fork, she leaned in even closer. "Ukyou won't have the problems with you that I have with Mousse. And if you're serious about getting her to like you, I have a few ideas!"

Konatsu could help but blush as she vividly outlined it for him.

* * *

Kuno didn't seem to be handling himself too well.

Ryu whistled as the girl leapt twelve feet into the air, undressing as she spun head over heels. He'd never even imagined someone could take off their clothes like that. The only disappointment was that she was wearing a skimpy black leotard underneath it all. The alternative would've been even more amusing, though what she currently wore left little to the imagination.

Next to him, Ryouga coughed, and wiped a trickle of blood from under his nose.

"Sister, please, be rational!" Kuno cried, chasing after her. Like all of India Squad, he was in plain clothes, wearing a UNETCO issue black suit and tie. Sadly, they blended in seamlessly with the tide of like-dressed Japanese men in Narita International Airport. Well, they had blended in anyway, until Kuno had gone over to talk to his sister.

She'd seemed nice enough at first. Cute, too, with long black hair and a traditional kimono. In fact, out of all of the girls Ranma seemed to associate with, this Kodachi Kuno girl was, in Ryu's opinion, definitely the easiest on the eyes. The laugh was a little grating, though. And where had she retrieved that gymnastic ribbon from? That leotard was skin tight!

"Damnit," Ryouga cursed softly. "They're making a scene. Mousse?"

"I'm on it." The confident male Amazon adjusted the glasses on his face, and erupted into a burst of speed. Ryu took a look around and noted how they were starting to draw a crowd of onlookers. People weren't just trying to get out of the way, they were muttering to each other, and watching the fight. The mission had gone tits up, right from the get go.

Twisting in midair, Kodachi deftly avoided one of Mousse's chains, which would have been an impressive feat (he doubted whether Ukyou or Shampoo could have duplicated it – this girl was flexible!) except that she failed to take into account the piano wire Mousse had shot out of his other sleeve. The Hidden Weapons Master was wearing the same outfit as the rest of them, but he could be stripped naked and still somehow be armed to the teeth.

Kodachi hit the wires with a yelp, but spun her ribbon around her body before she could become entangled. Kuno, bereft of being able to carry a sword (even a wooden one) into the airport, ran backwards to try and keep pace with his hyperactive younger sister as she leapt to an overhead metal support beam. The reason for his concern became evident when her ankles snapped together, caught in another wire, and she lost her balance.

Sure enough, as they began wrapping things up, a familiar sound came from behind. Ryu and Ryouga exchanged looks, and turned to face the onrushing police officers. Neither of them were looking forward to having to deal with the local law, but they'd been briefed on how to handle it, and they knew that it could either go over easily or messily, depending on how bitchy the police who showed up decided to be.

"Hey! Hey you there!" The closest of the trio that were pushing their way through the crowd, a short athletic young man with brown hair, was the one who had yelled loud enough to be heard over the crowd. He had his nightstick out, and Ryouga motioned Ryu forward. It would make them seem more aloof and intimidating if the local police assumed that the man in charge of a government operation wouldn't address them personally.

"What's going on here? What are you doing to that woman?" The man came up short when Ryu held out his badge.

"Sawada Souji," Ryu said his fake name like he'd been using it all his life. "National Police Agency Security Bureau. We appreciate your non-interference in a matter of national security."

The police officer stood there, stunned, and then he stared hard at the badge in Ryu's right hand. For what it was worth, Ryu let him get a good look at it. Looking over his shoulder, he saw Kuno and Mousse finally had Kodachi on the ground. Once her hands were tied in front of her, she got remarkable placid, as if she finally realized that not only was her brother here, but two other guys from the Nerima gang. Perhaps she'd given up once she realized that? He wasn't sure.

"Thank you for your cooperation," Ryu said, tucking the badge back into his suit jacket's inner breast pocket. "You'll receive information on what transpired here within the hour."

"What's going on?" Another police officer ran up, a woman this time, at least ten years older than the man. "Is everything ok?"

"Are we in any danger?" Someone yelled.

"Excuse me." Ryu bowed his head quickly, and caught up with the other three members of the team. At first, he hadn't been sure why they'd brought them out for this mission, even if it was Kuno's sister. Surely, he'd thought at first, they could just send Kuno and maybe one or two undercover operatives, right?

Wrong!

Who knew Kodachi would turn out to be so troublesome? He doubted Kuno himself could have handled her, especially without his sword. It was fortunate that Tatewaki had admitted that he would prefer backup. Ryouga and Mousse had quickly agreed, and off they'd all gone to get the right clearance and prepare for her arrival in Japan.

They bulled past more Airport security, and no one pried too deeply into their activities, which was a lucky break. The credentials would hold up to any sort of investigation, but the less time spent out in the open the better. It wouldn't do to be recognized, or recorded. It was bad enough that some jackass had probably caught half the fight with Kodachi on his digital camera-phone.

Then the five of them were in the safety of their (illegally parked but unmolested thanks to the government plates) white SUV. A little reluctantly, Kuno took the wheel, and a few seconds later they were driving away from the crowded international airport. It was obvious that Kuno would have preferred to be in the back with his still shocked sister, but out of the four of them he was by far the most experienced and reliable driver. Ryu was poor, and had never bothered to learn, Mousse could drive but with his vision there was always a chance of being on the wrong side of the road or crashing into the guard railing, and Ryouga would be driving around in circles for days with his sense of direction.

"Well, that wasn't so bad!" Kuno proclaimed, as they got onto the highway heading west.

"Is there a lot of pot in that dream world you live in?" Mouse asked, sounding totally serious. Ryouga looked at the Chinese boy out of the corner of his eye, and Ryu suspected he was a little scandalized by the remark. Of course, drugs weren't exactly an unknown in the places they sometimes traveled through, but as far as Ryu could recall none of the Nerima gang had ever made reference to it before (well, except one time Ranma had joked that the lost boy was 'as angry as a bull on crack'). The red slap mark on Mousse's face must've stung more than his pride, and it looked like he was happy to take out his frustration on the Blue Thunder.

"Come now, even a blind fool like yourself must admit that we handled things with efficiency and dignity," Kuno continued boastfully. "My only regret is the shame brought upon House Kuno by my dear sister who steadfastly refuses to this day to bow before the illimitable wisdom and experience of her only older brother."

"Brother dear…" Kodachi spoke up then, looking from Mousse and Ryu on her right and left respectively, to the front of the vehicle where Kuno drove and Ryouga sat silently in the passenger side seat.

"What sort of trouble have you gotten into this time?" she asked, sounding infinitely condescending. "And with these coarse ruffians no less? It is most unseemly to keep such company as this."

Mousse scoffed loudly. "Imagine the scene if Juliet Squad had been given this mission."

Ryouga shuddered visibly.

"Sister, you must understand that we are doing what is best for you…" Kuno began, repeating almost exactly what had set her off just a few minutes before.

"You cut short my trip to Oxford and then begin to dictate where I may or may not go?" Kodachi interrupted angrily. "You are not father, and even if you were, I would question the abruptness of your demands! How do you imagine you know what is or is not good for me, brother dear?"

"It wasn't even my idea," Kuno growled, gripping the wheel tightly. "You weren't safe there."

"Safe?" Kodachi laughed again, daintily covering her mouth with the back of her hand. "Brother dear, if I am ever in trouble, my darling Ranma will so doubt rush to my rescue with great haste! What need have I for your protection or that of your hirelings?"

Mousse sighed, and Ryouga busied himself by looking out the window. Ryu was tempted to do the same, but he kept an eye on the potentially dangerous girl. It didn't do to be careless, when she could still try and escape or something. Besides, she filled out that leotard very well.

Kuno ground his teeth together. "If you ever need rescuing, it is likely because of that fiend… that enemy of women…!"

Kodachi dismissed her brother with a contemptuous wave of her tied together hands. She then spied Ryu, as if for the first time, and gave him a good look over. He shied back a bit, feeling as if he was the one wearing the skimpy leotard and not her.

"You there!" She addressed him.

"Ryu," he answered her unasked question.

She didn't dignify it by repeating his name. "How is it that you stopped those officers of the law? What is your part in this motley crew?"

"I'm pleased to meet you, too," Ryu answered, by this time holding a completely divergent conversation with her. She stared at him for a few seconds, then smiled and laughed more softly. Facing forward, she held out her hands.

"Could one of you please untie me?" she asked politely. "I suppose it wouldn't hurt to at least listen to what you suggest."


	29. Ghost Wire II

**Quick Author Note:**  
_ In response to a few queries, I'd like to say here that I have made a few modifications to the chronology of the story. Originally, I had planned for this chapter to deal with Akane, and her attempts to 'surpass her limits' and earn the chance to fight with the others. However, in response to reviews and popular request, I shifted the next sub-arc dealing with Ukyou and the fiancé mess forward, and the Akane character arc backward. There is really only so much I can do at once, but expect Akane to play more of a role by around Chapter 13. As I've said before, I listen to every review and comment I receive, and when I can, I try hard to accommodate my readership._

_Now, back to the story…_

* * *

The _Umisenken_ made Operation Ghost Wire a walk in the park. There were at least a dozen guards on duty, but Ranma wasn't terribly worried about them. The Art of the Silent Thief would keep them from seeing him… unfortunately; the same couldn't be said for the electronic defenses the building employed. Cameras would still betray him, and so would any laser tripwires, tripwalls or infrared sensors. Luckily, steps were being taken to correct that problem.

Ranma waited behind the stairwell door as another security guard walked by, oblivious. Even if he had looked through the glass, he wouldn't have seen the Saotome heir. However, his progress was at a halt for the moment. Opening the door would set off an alarm, and the mission was strictly 'dry cleaning'- meaning no use of deadly force, no use of ANY force in fact, and no being seen.

"I'm in," Konatsu's voice came in over their squad level communications channel. They kept chatter to a minimum, and the ninja boy didn't say any more about his progress. Ranma knew where he was, however. Konatsu had been given the job of slipping down the elevator shaft, going through the ventilation system and disabling any alarms there (of which he'd reportedly found two), sneaking halfway down a hall, picking a lock to Security Office 2-C as soon as the occupant left, and then disabling the more troublesome security features.

It was a hell of a job, and Ranma would have offered to do it himself if his _Umisenken_ hadn't been better suited to getting past human opponents, rather than machines. As it was, Konatsu's ninja training had included defeating modern electronic surveillance, and he had disabled anything that got between him and his objectives with the speed and silent competence one would expect from a 'legendary kunoichi.'

It was just too bad they couldn't have brought better equipment. Being handed the mission, Ranma had soon learned why his squad was best suited for this sort of work. Section Seven of the UNETCO Charter forbid the use of advanced or alien-derived technologies against Earth based organizations or individuals outside of incidents involving direct alien intervention. It was a measure designed to protect human governments, political groups, and economic concerns from UNETCO manipulation. With the technology and training as its disposal, XCOM could become a threat to everything it was designed to protect. What military on Earth could stand against XCOM air and space superiority? What army could so much as scratch XCOM powered armor? What government could immunize itself against XCOM psionics?

Section Seven of the Charter prevented that.

Unfortunately, it also made dealing with Alien sympathetic organizations more difficult. Psionic infiltration was forbidden by Section Seven, and the fear of a slippery slope, and the most advanced technologies had to be reserved for the fight against the aliens themselves. This left conventional technologies and conventional methods. Martial Arts were a cheat around that restriction.

Ranma suspected that was the reason they had been brought into UNETCO in the first place. Not to fight aliens, which the organization had already been doing for years, but to better fight other human beings. The idea made Ranma a little uneasy, but it wasn't as if they were ordering him to assassinate anyone.

Yet.

Konatsu's voice returned. "All set. I'm pulling back."

"No silent alarms detected. Nothing on the local police network," Ukyou said, from her location in a skyscraper opposite Sirius Corporate Headquarters. "I'm watching the guards now. They're acting normal. I think we're in the clear."

"Nothing strange on the ground," Shampoo added. She and Ukyou were both together, working backup and monitoring the situation. They were coordinating the information coming from Ranma and Konatsu in the building, along with information passed onto them by operatives in government agencies and that made available via UNETCO electronic and human intelligence already in place. Behind them, and miles away, Seiran Mountain watched everything from a distance, offering their expertise on demand.

"Ok. I'm moving," Ranma said quietly, and making sure no one was around, he started to open the door. It was unlocked, and no alarm (silent or otherwise) sounded when he slipped through. Konatsu had taken care of the cameras with a looped feed that had been recorded on the spot. The little electronic bug would kill itself after a certain amount of time, and no one would be the wiser.

Another guard, armed for bear with a MP5A2 sub-machinegun, whistled as he walked by, never noticing the young man pressed up against the wall just a few feet away. Sneaking along, Ranma passed by a large open area, like a lobby. Beautiful hardwood stairs led down to the floor below, where the offices and mainframe were located. The carpeting below was red, with a massive stylized Silver Star in the middle – the Sirius Corporation Logo, representing the Dog Star. The walls facing north, what must have been an entire corner of the floor, were tall panes of glass, offering a breathtaking view of the world's largest megalopolis in all its glittering, neon glory.

The lower floor was not as well patrolled, and a greater reliance was put on non-human defenses. Ranma paused to adjust the eyepiece built into his stealth suit's mask. Everything seemed to be working properly, and as he cycled through the vision modes he didn't see any laser trip wires or tripwalls… there was a hidden camera set into the wall that he wouldn't have noticed, but nothing could be done about that if Konatsu hadn't caught it in a video loop. Gaps in the floor indicated pressure sensitive alarms, which was unexpected.

Looking up, Ranma saw two pencil sized gaps running along the ceiling. It wasn't ideal, but it would have to do. He just didn't have the clearance to leap down the hall, and jumping from one wall to another ran the risk of making too much noise. Falling on his hands, he pushed up and touched his feet to the ceiling. The groove was small; too small for his big toe to fit in. Luckily, his index toe was able to wedge itself in place, leaving him as a less than ideal angle.

His Martial Arts Tea Ceremony training paid off again!

The training had been to move without getting up off the seating position, using your toes to maneuver. Once mastered, it could even be used to hang from projections in the wall or ceiling, grasping onto the surface with your big and index toes. This wasn't quite the same, since he was sticking one toe into a depression, rather than locking both around a projection, but it would do. Daring to take one step at a time, he quickly reached the end of the hall, and flipped down onto his feet.

Ducking behind a wall, just to be sure, he got his bearings and remembered where his targets were. He had several to take care of, and he had to be fast. A handy bulletin board nearby sported a map with names for offices, as well as a variety of post-it notes related to work that was being done. He headed for the nearest office, and frowned at the electronic card swipe used in place of a proper lock and key.

Genma had taught him to pick old fashioned locks, but nothing like this.

He supposed that, when the time came, the Anything Goes Martial Arts curriculum would have to be updated for the twenty first century. This was where the UNETCO toys came in. Each door required an authentication token to open in the form of a smartcard. Ranma retrieved a device with a long, thin projection under a flat cylindrical body. Placing it right against the door, and fitting the thin section into the swiping mechanism, he flicked it on and waited as a faint series of red lights began to cycle around in a circle and turn green.

Sixteen tense seconds later, the door bolt retracted, and Ranma was able to gain entry. The office was large but rather messy, with papers scattered about in cardboard boxes, and several overflowing desk drawers open. Still, it wasn't hard to find the phone, next to a few framed family pictures. Ranma stared at them for a few seconds, wondering what a man with two kids and a pretty wife would gain from collaborating with aliens. Then again, this man could have just been an unwitting patsy.

Either way…

Ranma quickly opened the bottom of the phone where the batteries were held. Intel had gotten the brand of the phones right at least, and Ranma quickly replaced the foam strip on the back of the casing. Now, it would report anything and everything that happened in the room or over the phone to UNETCO. Imbedded in the foam, the bug was all but invisible. The computer he left alone.

Slipping out, he repeated the procedure; going to all the offices on the list he'd been given. Sirius was a major concern that allegedly used its alien connections to corner the market on advanced electronics technologies. It also financed activities that endangered UNETCO interests, and by extension the well being of the world as a whole. Their Japan Headquarters was likely the focal point of their assistance in locating martial artists and others for later alien abduction.

Finally, Ranma broke into the room with the computer mainframe. There were more pressure sensitive plates built into the floor in addition to the usual cameras and inactive laser tripwires. It was likely that the mainframe had recent backups of all the work done by computers on the LAN, and UNETCO intended to get a copy of it for themselves. The computer was vertically oriented, which worked in Ranma's favor. Finding a small foothold on a wall, he gripped it with his toes and in a second stood perpendicular to the wall with the face of the mainframe over his head.

The mainframe seemed to operate on a secure, wired network, to keep anyone from trying to jump in on their separate wireless system. Or that was what Intel had told them. Ranma wasn't sure what that meant, if anything, but he knew what he'd been told to look for and do. Sure enough, there was a laptop friendly USB port waiting for an administrator to make use of. Getting into the system from there would be up to the Tech-heads back at Seiran Mountain; he was just the delivery boy.

Retrieving a small device the size of a keychain ornament, he plugged it in.

"Linkup established with Psyche," Ukyou said, keeping her voice quiet even though she wasn't in any real danger of being overheard from where she was stationed. "Things look good. 'Five by five' is the term, I think. Ghost is now communicating with Cupid and Psyche."

Ranma kept quiet and waited. He'd made very good time, so he wasn't particularly worried. He knew the data linkup, the hacking, and the transfer would take time. Easing himself back onto the floor in a normal standing position, he fell into a cross-legged position and concentrated on centering himself.

His thoughts soon drifted back to Ukyou and Shampoo, and how he was going to deal with them. He'd used the new mission as justification to put things off for a few days, but if he didn't act soon it would almost certainly bite him on the ass sooner rather than later. The two girls generally behaved themselves when on a mission, but at the base, during training, almost any other time it was like business as usual for them.

He really had to put his foot down.

If only his stupid old man hadn't stolen the Kuonji_ yatai_ as a dowry then he could've written the whole thing off. Mostly. Then there was when the dumb ol' panda had eaten Shampoo's prize, and started that whole mess! And once things had started down that road, it was hard to stop. He'd wanted to be friends with Ukyou, and mollify her into not wanting to fight, but complimenting her had just gotten it into her head that he wanted her as a fiancé. He didn't!

Well, he liked the attention he got from her, and from Shampoo (and the free food was another nice bonus), but he didn't want to marry them. He didn't really even want to marry Akane; he just wanted to be with her, and have her pay attention to him (and not Ryouga or P-chan or Shinnosuke or any other guy). Now, two years later, he had to make some hard decisions. Knowing Ukyou and Shampoo, only a direct 'no nonsense' sort of move would settle the issue once and for all.

"Hmm…" Ranma mused. "Maybe if Ryouga and Mousse are there, I can use them as human shields..."

A couple minutes later, a voice interrupted his thoughts.

"Cupid has sent a green light," Ukyou spoke up, referring to Seiran Mountain HQ. That was his cue to head back. Retrieving the device he'd plugged into the mainframe, Ranma backtracked out the wing of offices, past the hall with the pressure sensors, up to the next floor, and then to the stairs where he'd began. From there it was back to the grate he'd entered from, through that to the elevator well, and then up to the roof where they'd originally broken in.

Konatsu was waiting there, and he carefully closed up the panel they'd removed, and reset the wires they'd bypassed to avoid setting off an alarm. Like Ranma, he wore a black stealth suit that concealed any potentially distinguishing features. A round lens in the middle of his facemask, where the forehead should have been, along with two smaller lenses over the eyes stared back at him. They looked dull and empty, like a camera with dead batteries. Apparently this technology still wasn't quite advanced enough to fall under the mandate of Section Seven.

"Let's go," Ranma said, and the two moved off to the edge of the roof. A fifty four story sheer drop loomed before them, but neither gave it more than a moment's notice. Walking off the edge, Ranma fell a foot and a half before stopping, balancing on a thin wire connecting the building behind him with another smaller one about three hundred feet away. Normally, a helicopter would have inserted them on the building they were to infiltrate, but Ranma and Konatsu's skills had afforded UNETCO more liberty with where they could run an insertion/extraction.

Running along the nearly invisible wire, Ranma still tried not to look down. A parking lot and garage stretched out below, blending in with busy roads and small buildings. But it wasn't the height that could have messed up his balance; it was the disorientation from hundreds of bright moving lights and the vertigo of focusing on them while compensating for the movement of the wire due to the wind. A fall of this height (Akane's fondness for 'orbit punches' and kicks not-withstanding) would have been most unfortunate. Ryouga could possibly survive it, given his rock hard head and likewise constitution, but Ranma didn't want to consider the effect it would have on his body.

Reaching the end of the wire, he jumped, flipped, and landed on the roof. A minute later, Konatsu joined him. Neither could read the other's expressions behind their masks, but both were grinning broadly. Altogether, the mission had been very exciting… and running back and forth over a shaved tightrope two hundred meters in the air always got the blood pumping.

A few seconds later, while Konatsu retracted the wire bridging the two buildings, the door to the roof opened and Ukyou stepped out, waving. She wore plainclothes, playing the part of a secretary or the like, and both boys took her presence as the signal to take off their masks and get a breath of fresh air. It was windy and cold, and a blast of chilly atmosphere hit Ranma in the face, causing him to wince.

"Everything going ok?" he asked, walking up to her. "When can we expect pickup?"

"An unmarked civilian helicopter will be by to pick us up in about seven minutes," Ukyou explained, her eyes darting from Konatsu to him. "So what was it like? All that high tech ninja spy stuff?"

"Pretty neat," Ranma replied, and looked to Konatsu, offering him an opening to voice his opinion. He was the only real trained ninja present, after all.

"The life of a shinobi is five percent preparation, ninety four percent waiting," Konatsu finally said, after being sure they were waiting for an answer. "And one percent frantic terror."

"He tells it like it is," Ranma quipped, and offered a friendly nod to the cross dressing genius ninja.

"Ah," Ukyou began to say, her tone less sure than before. "Ran-chan. I… I'd like to ask you something. About a few days ago."

Ranma sighed under his breath, and turned to the other guy present. "Konatsu. Can you go help Shampoo with the equipment?"

"Yes, sir," Konatsu replied crisply, and headed for the door. To his credit, he didn't even look back.

When he was out of sight, Ranma quickly spoke up, before Ukyou could continue where she'd left off. "Don't call me Ran-chan on duty, Ukyou. Just Ranma will do."

Ukyou looked a little hurt by the rebuff, but she relented. "You're right. The situation and all…"

That was it exactly.

"So what's bothering you?" he asked, looking out over the dancing sea of lights that was the Greater Tokyo Area. Standing next to him, Ukyou hesitated before responding.

"I'd like permission to speak freely and off the record," she said, referring to the fact that normally UNETCO monitored and recorded everything they said and did when on duty. As the team's commanding officer, only Ranma could deactivate the devices which watched over them. He looked at her briefly, considering the request. Anything off record would be noted with some suspicion (mind controlling aliens tended to instill some healthy paranoia in any organization designed to combat them), and he'd have to answer for it later to his superiors.

Still, he gave her the benefit of the doubt.

"The time is twenty one hundred hours and eighteen minutes. Deactivate Watchmen One and Three," he announced, for the benefit of said devices and those back at base HQ. Voice recognition software confirmed the request and the phrase. A second later, the command was carried out.

"Thanks," Ukyou said, giving a few seconds to be sure they wouldn't be overheard. "I'm… I guess I'm lucky I beat Shampoo in rock-paper-scissors, or else she'd be here instead of me."

Ranma was glad they'd solved the problem without doing anything that would cause him trouble later, but he still wasn't sure what this was about. If she'd asked him to deactivate the Watchmen devices just so she could share some alone time with him he'd be pissed off, and justifiably so, he thought.

"Ukyou," he prompted.

"I wanted to…" she closed her eyes and shook her head sadly. She seemed to be struggling with what to say, but he waited for her to compose her thoughts.

"I wanted to say I'm sorry. About before, when I… I panicked I guess."

"You want to apologize for that?" He asked, caught off guard. During Operation Zebra, she'd been psionically attacked by one of the aliens, maybe even the Ethereal (since they didn't need line of sight to attack you), but in the end she'd been able to pull together enough to still fight, and take out a Floater that had been trying to ambush him from above.

"I told you that you didn't have to protect me, that I could take care of myself, but… but it wasn't true, was it?" She asked, and sucked in a sniffle. She wasn't normally the type to cry, and she looked like she wasn't about to start now. "I couldn't stop it, not by myself. I… it was horrible, and I couldn't stop it."

She shuddered. "I was the only one who broke down like that."

"Ukyou," he had to resist using 'Ucchan' to try and comfort her. "I can't imagine what that… that thing showed you when it invaded your mind, but you saved me back there. When it counted, you were there, and you didn't hesitate."

He offered her a platonic smile, and placed his hand on her shoulder. "Ukyou, listen: I'd never been more proud to know you than I was at that moment. You don't have anything to be ashamed of."

To his relief, she didn't try and turn the moment into an excuse for her to get closer to him. She just stood there for a few seconds before reaching over with her right hand and resting it on top of his, which he'd kept on her shoulder. She didn't reply, and they stood like that for a few more seconds before Ranma sensed a chance to say more.

"I was scared too," he admitted, and she looked at him with undisguised shock.

"You?" She asked, amazed. "But…!"

"I'm not too stupid to realize when my life is in danger, or when a situation gets serious. I've been scared before, Ukyou; real scared. Not all the guys I've fought have been like Ryouga or Kuno, where I never thought they'd actually kill me. More than a few, like Herb, or Saffron, or even Pantyhose…" Ranma took a deep breath, and kept his eyes fixed on the horizon. "Those bastards would have killed me. Herb nearly cut my head off. Saffron would've burned me to a crisp if not for Akane. Even Mousse and Ryu could have meant to kill me at one point or another."

"Only an idiot like Kuno wouldn't be scared back there," he said with a smirk. "And look what happened to him. But you'll get stronger; we all will. Together. That's how we'll get through this, and that's how we'll win. Ok?"

"I just don't want to feel like the weak link in the chain…" Ukyou didn't sound as pained as before, which Ranma was thankful for. He'd never been very good at cheering people up, but he was trying real hard to correct that about himself. Maybe then he'd get pummeled by Akane less often, and maybe, hopefully, he could squeeze out of all the engagements that entangled him.

Hell, it was worth a try at least.

"I mean," she continued. "I'm not like Shampoo. I'm not going to pretend I'd stand a chance against you, or Ryouga, or probably even Mousse or Konatsu. By the way that Ryu guy acts, I'd bet he's stronger than me and Shampoo put together. And Kuno… well, I'd like to think I could hand him his ass if I had to."

"Ukyou… if you picked a hundred million people at random, I'd put money on you being better than any of them, men and women." Ranma hoped that had sounded as encouraging as he'd wanted it to. Praise wasn't his specialty. "You're not going to be a weak link unless you start questioning yourself. You just have to take this seriously."

"I am!" she replied defensively. "I really am!"

There was the chance he'd been looking for.

He popped the Big Question. "If this work we're doing meant canceling the engagement between us, would you agree to it?"

She seemed about to blurt out an answer, but retracted it before it left her lips. Her expression and eyes fell, and for a while she just stared at her feet.

"Don't ask me that, Ranma," she finally answered. "Don't. Please."

"I would," was his only reply. Next to him, Ukyou sucked in a sharp breath of cold air. Her hands started to wring together, and she went from looking down to looking at the city below them, to looking at the stars in the night sky. He could see, even feel, the cascading emotions running through her _ki_. She was strong, and her emotions were strong, but untamed and uncontrolled. If she could harness her emotions, if she could properly channel her _ki_, she would be more powerful than she ever imagined.

But would she?

Could she?

'I would.' He could see her running those words over and over again through her mind. 'I would.'

"If you want to talk more about this later… I'd make time for it," he said with an air of finality.

"What about Akane?" Ukyou asked softly, as always identifying her true rival for his affection as the Tendo girl, and not the Chinese Amazon.

"I don't think I'm gonna marry her either," he answered, honestly. "Not any time soon. But that's my business… and hers."

Ukyou nodded slowly.

"I'm going back on record, and so are you," he announced, and said the proper phrase. "Reactivate Watchmen One and Three. Time is twenty one hundred hours and twenty three minutes."

A few seconds later, Konatsu and Shampoo returned from below, carrying the laptops and other equipment that had been set up for the mission. Ukyou kept her back to them, and he left her alone while he went to make sure they had everything. Two minutes later, a silent black silhouette descended and picked them up.

* * *

A thousand operations a day must have been performed throughout the Tokyo area. Each hospital was a maze of rooms and suites and labs and corridors, as vast in scale as any corporate skyscraper. They were monuments in stone to the profit and power of the medical profession over human frailty.

Ryouga stayed perfectly still, and didn't even think about moving. He hated hospitals with a passion, and not just because he could so easily get lost in them. Whenever he'd ended up in a facility like this, there had always been questions: uncomfortable questions, questions he couldn't answer. Questions about how he got such terrible injuries, or where his parents were, or why he was uninsured, whether he was homeless and had stolen those credit cards…

There were no good answers to those questions.

The other three members of his team milled around more freely, and even occasionally wandered off to get a drink or use the facilities. The only exception was Kuno, who remained stoic, waiting for news. They were essentially alone in their little corner of the waiting room, and that was preferred. Ideally, they would blend in and be forgotten by everyone present.

Ryu returned from the other side of the room bearing a pamphlet. "Hey, check his out. You know they have a laser eye surgery place downstairs?"

"Isn't that something?" Mousse, the obvious object of Ryu's query, smirked and adjusted his glasses. They were new ones, much thinner than those he'd been using before joining UNETCO, but they still stood out on the Chinese martial artist's face. That said he went back to reading the newspaper propped up against his crossed legs. The message was clear: 'I see fine with my glasses, thank you very much.'

Ryu, however, was undeterred. Ryouga had noticed that the Kumon Dojo Heir had gotten much more talkative over the last few weeks.

"It says here," Ryu continued to say, despite Mousse's dismissal of the topic. "That the United States military offers free eye surgery and that the JSDF is considering doing the same. You'd think we'd get a good deal like that too. I mean, considering… everything else."

Ryu wisely watched exactly what he said; there was no telling who could overhear a conversation. Mousse sighed, and flipped past a few pages to the other half the article he'd been looking at. After a few seconds, though, he shook his head and lowered the paper, keeping his fingers between the pages to save his place.

"They did make that offer, actually," Mousse said, noting how even Kuno had given some attention to the implied question and the conversation in general.

"And?" Ryu asked, sitting down on one of the little blue waiting room chairs.

"It isn't quite that straightforward," Mousse explained. "I was around five when I began to suffer from (what I later learned was) acute angle-closure glaucoma. When I complained about my loss of vision and the pain I was eventually given over to one of the village healers for… treatment. It wasn't effective. My mother eventually took me to a Chinese doctor in a city, where we learned that it was too late to correct the problem and that my vision was permanently damaged."

"So it can't be fixed?" Ryu asked, and then winced at the question. "I'm sorry..."

"Don't be," Mousse replied with a shallow dangerous smirk. "Living with it made me stronger. Not weaker."

"Glasses help a little," he then added, and tapped the rim of the metal frame over his right eye. "And they're not nearly as much of a pain as you think. Sometimes it helps to not be able to see things. Everything else I've tried to compensate for by training."

"So they're nothing more that can be done?" Ryouga asked, speaking up for the first time in a while. "What about 'the shop?'"

"Lieutenant Tsuchihashi…" Mousse quickly looked around and hoped no one had overheard him besides the other three guys, even though it was just a name. "He and I looked into that when I first arrived. The 'shop' does make replacements, but it would keep me off duty for a few weeks; time I'd rather spend more productively."

Ryu smirked back at Mousse, impressed by the answer the myopic martial artist had provided. Kuno nodded solemnly, and Ryouga couldn't help but also smile in approval. He'd have made a similar choice if solving his directional dysfunction had kept him off duty for a month or more. It was a handicap, and a bad one, but it could be worked around… and like Mousse's bad vision, his damn directional curse had made him stronger. Much stronger.

It was part of the great divide between the elite cadre of martial artists, and so many of the extremely skilled but fundamentally limited individuals he had seen in his travels, and evaluated for UNETCO intervention. To harness one's _ki_ fully, one had to be willing to throw away any pretense of a normal life or a human existence in pursuit of the Art. It wasn't just about suffering through training most would consider insane, it was about a mentality that valued the Art over fitting into society.

That was why Akane and so many others would never be stronger than they currently were.

"Gentlemen," a doctor said as he approached the group. He was a middle aged man with black hair and squinting eyes, and he was one of many permanent plainclothes second tier operatives of UNETCO, dispersed across the world in areas of importance. Many didn't even know who they really worked for or who their research or work actually benefited. This man, however, was more in the loop than most.

"How is she, doctor?" Kuno asked, getting up from where he'd sat for the first time. "Is…?"

"We'll talk about it as you follow me, if you please." The doctor turned and they followed as he headed down one of a hundred empty white tiled halls. As Ryouga walked, Ryu stayed close by, keeping a constant eye out to make sure India Squad's commanding officer didn't get lost. He was silently very grateful for the other man's help. After the initial embarrassment of making clear his 'problem' with getting places, Ryu hadn't once made a crack about it, and if the duty frustrated him he'd kept that fact to himself.

"I've completed the analysis, and she's clean. No implants, no lesions, no signs of prior abduction." The doctor gave them Kodachi's diagnosis with a straight, serious face that belied doing it more than a few times before. "When I was finished, I also took the liberty of giving her a 'clear conscience' just like the ones you boys have."

Ryouga briefly looked down at his gloved hand, and not because his recent training had caused some distressing lingering pain there. Like the others, he had suspicions about where his 'conscience' was, but he couldn't be sure. Almost anywhere fleshy was possible. The euphemism 'conscience' referred to a sub-dermal tracking device implanted in all UNETCO personnel and many of their family members under UNETCO protection. Supposedly, they were kept off line, and only activated under very specific circumstances. An alien abduction would set one off, for example, but otherwise they remained silent and untraceable. How it worked exactly, Ryouga didn't know and didn't really care.

Kuno breathed a sigh of relief. "Hopefully it shall be enough."

"Would you prefer the alternative?" Mousse asked, knowing full well the answer. "This is the only option we have at the moment."

"So it would seem," Kuno agreed. "But she is not your sister, is she?"

"If she's done here, then we'll want to move her out of this hospital immediately," Ryouga spoke up, returning the conversation to its proper topic. "How much longer can we expect her to be asleep, Doctor?"

"You have a good four hours at least," the older man replied, and crossed his arms behind his back.

"Plenty of time," Ryu said.

"I can not say I like the nature of this," Kuno interrupted. "I will include my reservations in my report."

"You're free to do so," Ryouga answered, though Kuno had said as much at least twice before. "But you yourself stated that she couldn't be trusted to stay in protective custody, and she hasn't done anything that warrants being put away more securely. So all we can do is let her go with a warning and keep an eye on her."

"Do you really think the truth would be the best thing to tell her?" Mousse asked, his glasses glinting from the overhead lights.

"She didn't seem that bad…" Ryu began to argue. "Plus she has some skills."

"You don't know her like we do," Mousse replied, quickly. Kuno huffed in response, and Ryouga grunted. A minute later, they were standing around Kodachi's sleeping form. She was still wearing her leotard beneath the medical tunic, and the only real difference in her appearance other than that was her ponytail - it was unbound, letting her black hair fall freely.

With surprising gentleness, Kuno reached down and picked her up.

It was time to go.


	30. Ghost Wire III

* * *

**From**: SLt. Hibiki Ryouga  
**Sent**: Tuesday, November 14, 2006, 02:12  
**To**: Tendo Nabiki  
**Subject**: Anything New? 

I've just now gotten back. Anything new happen while I was away?

Nice email address, by the way, "10do."

-Hibiki

* * *

**From**: Tendo Nabiki  
**Sent**: Tuesday, November 14, 2006, 07:04  
**To**: SLt. Hibiki Ryouga  
**Subject**: Re: Anything New? 

--  
I've just now gotten back. Anything new happen while I was away?  
--

Akane's been trying to cook again. You sure Ranma had a mission too, and that he wasn't just making himself scarce? She says she'll try again Wednesday and hopes you'll be there, too. I'm amazed there haven't been complaints about her cooking melting the waste recyclers given what she made last night.

I do have some news that may interest you, but I think it would be better to talk about it in person. How about the cafeteria for lunch? 1 o'clock.

--  
Nice email address, by the way, "10do."  
--

Believe it or not, there's actually another NabikiT working in UNETCO out there somewhere, and NTendo is just wrong for obvious reasons. I thought Nabiki10do was a nice compromise.

---

"Supreme excellence is found in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."  
Sun Tzu

---

Nabiki Tendo  
Revenue & Finance Division  
Far East Asia Branch  
United Nations Extraterrestrial Combat Organization  
Ext. 6022 - phone  
Ext. 8434 – fax

* * *

**From**: SLt. Hibiki Ryouga  
**Sent**: Tuesday, November 14, 2006, 7:43  
**To**: Tendo Nabiki  
**Subject**: Re: Anything New? 

--  
I do have some news that may interest you, but I think it would be better to talk about it in person. How about the cafeteria for lunch? 1 o'clock.  
--

I'll be there.

-Hibiki

* * *

Nabiki wasn't hard to find. 

Even without Shirokuro's able aid, Ryouga would have noticed her. She was very much like Ranma in that respect. Neither of them really stood out physically in a crowded place, but they both had an almost palpable sense of assured self confidence. The eye was unconsciously drawn to them. It was a strange trait, and one Ryouga couldn't say he envied. That sort of demeanor just invited trouble.

He walked over to where she sat, alone, looking over a few sheets of paper laid out next to her half empty plate. She had taken advantage of the Pad Thai noodles that were on the day's menu much like he had. Sitting down, he began to eat, the morning training having worn down his _ki _reserves. Like Ranma, he had a tremendous appetite as a result of his accelerated metabolism, but unlike his rival and ex-enemy he didn't turn eating into a contest, and never rushed himself unless it was necessary.

Good food, after all, was something to savor.

Midway into a bite and almost done with his lunch, he looked up and noticed Nabiki staring at him.

"You're a little late," she began, sounding like she intended to lecture him on punctuality, but not actually following through. Something else got her attention. "What happened to your hands?"

Ryouga's hands were wrapped in white training tape, but hints of red could be seen under the surface especially around the fingertips. Lying his fork down on his plate, he held up his right hand in front of his face, letting her get a better view of it. He wondered if he should actually tell her…

"Training," he settled on saying.

Nabiki shook her head in obvious aggravation. "What? Have you been punching metal all morning?"

"Only for an hour," Ryouga clarified, and he smiled at the sweat drop that slowly traveled down her forehead. By her aghast expression, he could tell she hadn't exactly been aiming for an accurate guess. Honestly, though, why was she so surprised?

"An exotic alloy plate is actually much more effective than the lead one I used to use," he explained a bit more, though he wasn't sure why. Maybe because he wanted to see that expression of hers just a little longer. "But that isn't what messed up my hands. A few days ago, I realized what was limiting my progress in developing the Tenketsu Family of techniques. Generally speaking, the amount of ki you can accumulate at any point on your body is limited by the surface area of your skin. That is why it is easier to build up ki in your hands and feet than it is your shoulder or knee or forehead."

"So: what?" Nabiki asked, slowly drawing towards the same conclusion he'd came to. "Wrinkles make it easier to focus ki?"

"I think so. And since I won't be getting wrinkly for a few more years…"

Her eyes widened as it dawned on her. "Oh no… you didn't? Oh my God, you DID!" She drew back visibly. "You actually…!"

He shrugged, and reached for his glass of water. "I imagine that's the look Doctor Pearson will give me when I tell him, but it was the only way. I actually got the idea from one of your father's scrolls which described using bamboo to punch small holes in the palm, and I consulted with Genma before doing it."

"That... that's just horrible!" Nabiki gasped, staring with morbid curiosity at his hands. "Doesn't it hurt? Won't it scar?"

"I broke two ribs, the bridge of my nose, had two concussions and bled internally for three days while I learned the Bakusai Tenketsu. In my fight with Ranma after that, both of those ribs, which had healed, broke again." Ryouga actually laughed at that. "He sure got lucky and hit me on the right side… But I'd gladly do it again. And again. And again. To become stronger. This is nothing."

Nabiki pushed away what was left of her lunch, her appetite suddenly absent. "I'm surprised your training didn't shock Akari into a heart attack!"

"Akari," Ryouga repeated the name, his tone of voice turning melancholy. "She hated it. It was one of the reasons I had to practice far from the house… I think she always hoped I'd stop. But… but it was nice to come home and actually have someone worry about if I was hurt. I don't think I've ever felt anything that made me feel so… so…"

He struggled to find the words. "So wanted… and cared for… as I did when I was with her."

"You loved her a lot, huh?" Nabiki asked, resting her cheek on her palm and propping her arm up on the table. "You know, for a while, I thought you were going to turn into Kuno, pining over both her and Akane."

Ryouga's expression changed then, becoming confused, then a little angry, and then finally introspective. It was a strange change, and Ryouga could see that his response hadn't been the one Nabiki had expected. She didn't know, he reminded himself. She didn't know about P-chan, and about how he'd lost those memories. He hardly knew Akane now, and when he thought about her, he felt…

Nothing.

He still had memories of standing in front of her with flowers, of stuttering and trying to tell her how he felt, of sitting alone and thinking about how much he missed her. Those memories were still there, but they were empty and had no emotional context anymore. He knew he had pined for her, but he couldn't really remember why. Whatever he had pined for, whatever he had longed for, it had been so intimately wound around his experiences as P-chan, her pet pig, that it was completely gone now.

How much had he forgotten because of his cure? How much had he lost, and was he really better or worse for the experience? After curing himself, he had found a manila envelope on his bed, and he knew abstractly that he'd written down the sins and details of his past life on papers enclosed within that package, but he couldn't for the life of him remember what any of it was about. That single unmarked brown folder had filled him with an almost unspeakable dread, and he had quickly hidden it away.

Who knew what horrors were inside that Pandora's Box?

Ranma was the only one who came close.

"Nabiki," he said, in the end. "You said you had some news for me."

"Want to skip the small talk and get right to business, eh?" She didn't sound adverse to the change in topic, but he could sense a lingering hunger in her for answers to unasked questions.

"Ok," she started to say, after taking a look over her shoulder. No one was nearby; speaking quietly they wouldn't be eavesdropped on. "It was tricky, but I found a few little tidbits of information. All the human remains were shipped down to the Xenobiology Lab. From there, most were cremated, and I assume the ashes were scattered over one of the nearby lakes or something. A few of the remains were relabeled as 'Xenogenic Samples,' given some kind of identification label I couldn't make sense of, and shipped out. Most of those went to Fry Canyon in the United States, a few went to Andermatt in Switzerland, and a few were shipped to a Front operation in Nagasaki."

"So, I called up one of Staples over there to confirm some of the shipping information, ostensibly to make sure they were delivered on time, all together, and in good condition, to justify the cost…." Nabiki paused, seeing that he'd been lost at some point. "What?"

"Staples?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Staple is a term we use for other UNETCO office staff," she explained briskly, and then went back to where she had left off. "Anyway, he told me that the 'Transgenetics' were fine and that there wasn't a problem… I'm no scientist, but I've seen enough TV to guess what that means."

"Alien human hybrids," Nabiki finished with a measure of disgust. "My guess is that the regular junk got shipped out to the science types over in the US and Europe bases for research. I've heard that's where most of UNETCO's lab work is done. The hybrid stuff was sent to a local place, with access to local DNA records, since any victims would probably be Japanese citizens."

Ryouga crossed his arms and thought about her conclusion.

"That's my educated guess, anyway, based on what I could find," Nabiki continued when she realized he wasn't going to immediately respond. "I didn't break any rules, so don't worry about that either."

"I can't say I'm happy to hear your theory," he admitted a few seconds after she finished. "I suppose I should tell you why I asked you to look into this in the first place."

Nabiki just nodded, eager to hear what had prompted him to ask for her help.

"Akari and I were abducted together, on the same night," Ryouga told her, his voice soft but laced with a strong undercurrent of pent up anger. "I think they actually came for the sumo pigs, but when they found her and me, they took the opportunity. One of the aliens present was an Ethereal. It… entered my mind, and learned about my martial arts, about my fights, and about where others like me could be found."

"Nerima," Nabiki supplied. "Us."

He lowered his head in unspoken apology. "There wasn't anything I could do. I wasn't strong enough to save myself, to protect myself… and I wasn't strong enough to save her, either. I…"

His breathing started to grow deeper, and his upper lip curled, revealing an over-large canine tooth.

"I watched, as they cut her open." His hands clenched tightly, and a red stain grew beneath the white bandages. "Eventually, she stopped screaming, stopped moving, and up until a few days ago, I'd assumed that she'd died. She must've died. That's what I thought. But what if they took what was left of her…"

"What do you mean? Took what's left of her?" Nabiki reciprocated the loathing he felt for the aliens, but it was only a tiny fraction of what he felt every time he closed his eyes and saw Akari's face, tears trailing down her cheeks.

He closed his eyes, and considered not telling her as much as he had promised. But he was a man of his word, and she had more than fulfilled her part of the bargain. He really shouldn't tell her, not this, but he had decided that he would anyway. Nabiki was smart and cunning in ways no one else he knew was, and it was good to talk to someone about this. There was always the base shrink, but he had an ingrained dislike of nosy doctors in general.

Besides, if he avoided the right words, he technically wasn't giving away any real secrets.

"It is common knowledge that the aliens produce hybrids," Ryouga replied, looking Nabiki in the eyes. "There are three types: the first is the result of a Chryssalid attacking and implanting an egg in a human host, creating a sort of walking corpse. The second is the most well known… it is a cross between a Sectoid and a human. Sometimes these look like aliens, with only a few human genes, and sometimes they look almost entirely human and are used to replace people on Earth and infiltrate important organizations."

Nabiki faltered at the insidious thought. That someone could look human, act human, and yet be some sort of… thing spying and working secretly to destroy mankind from the inside was a grim prospect. How many groups, how many governments, had been compromised in this way?

"Then, worse than the others," Ryouga finally said. "There are the Human Ethereal hybrids."

"You think…?"

He nodded in grim reply. "I hope not. But… I suppose a part of me wants her to be alive, even like that. Because then, just maybe, there's still a chance of saving her."

Nabiki seemed to be torn between repulsion at the thought of someone she cared for being in such a state, and understanding that any small glimmer of hope was something that could never be totally pushed aside or reasoned away. He watched her, and saw how her eyes focused on his bandaged hands.

"You'd do anything for her, wouldn't you?" she asked.

"Of course I would," he replied calmly. "She was one of only two people to every truly justify my existence."

The middle Tendo daughter looked up at him. "Your existence?"

"All my life I've been lost, Nabiki. My family is little more than a bunch of strangers with the same last name. I ran, every day, but the one thing I could never get away from was who I was, and what the lonely road of my life seemed to be, stretched out before me. Why did I exist? What was my goal? I had no answers for these questions. I was just… walking. Walking and waiting to die."

"Then Ranma showed up. He beat me, stole my bread time and time again, and humiliated me in front of the entire school and what few people I thought of as my friends." Ryouga turned his eyes towards the ceiling, letting out a pained breath of air. "He saved me… he gave me something, someone, to hate. You know what happened next."

"I challenged him, and by the time I got there he was gone. But that was fine," Ryouga was telling the story calmly, with a detached and mildly amused appreciation. "That was just fine. In the hate he gave me, I found my existence, and my justification. I poured all my energies and effort into tracking him down, and becoming strong enough to defeat him."

"Ranma, you see, was everything… had everything… I'd ever wanted. He had a perfect sense of direction. He easily made friends. He was confident and people admired him. He was strong, and fast, and… and he had his father." Ryouga screwed his eyes tight. "For better or worse, he had his father."

"But, eventually, my hatred for Ranma… turned into respect. I didn't want it to. I wanted to keep hating him, to keep envying him. I wanted to keep dreaming of crushing his hopes, dashing his ambitions to pieces. I wanted to ruin his life, but in the end I lost my way. That was when the depression came back, when I realized that even if I became stronger than Ranma, I couldn't really beat him. Not in any way that mattered. The Shishi Hokoudan duel proved that. Losing your existence, I learned, is so much worse than having none to begin with."

"Then, Akari…" He lowered his head so that Nabiki could see his face again. "She loved me, accepted me, cared for me. These were things I'd dreamed about, but never really imagined I could have. She became the only other justification I had for existing, the only thing to validate my being on this world. I… would have died for her a hundred times over."

"Do you understand, Nabiki?" He stared at her then with a blazing intensity. "I would have gladly suffered through all the torments of Hell for an existence worth having! Akari still justifies my existence… alive or dead! For the first time in my life, I can see where I'm going, and I know I'm not lost."

He raised his right hand, mauled fingers curling menacingly.

"What else can I do?" He slowly brought his hand to his face, and hid behind it. "If Akari isn't dead, if she's alive and there's the smallest chance of saving her… I have to bring her back, or be there to lay her soul to rest."

"For what its worth," Nabiki offered, sounding more sympathetic than he'd ever imagined her being. "I'll help any way I can. Besides, I think… we can help each other."

Ryouga's expression slowly changed, as what remained of his mercurial temper flared out to be replaced by perplexed curiosity. "What do you mean?"

She smiled softly and slid a piece of paper across the table.

"A recommendation form?" He stared at it, and then looked up at her for an explanation.

"I've been made to understand that they don't entirely trust me and that they're not quite convinced of what I'm capable of. I need an officer to vouch for me," Nabiki casually spelled out. "And you're a 'Special Acting Lieutenant' aren't you? Besides which, I hear the Commander takes your recommendations very seriously, since you were the one who proposed organizing squads of martial artists."

Ryouga looked down at the paper again. "You're applying for a transfer? So soon? To what?"

The mercenary girl snickered at the question.

"Signal Intelligence."

* * *

Shampoo pivoted her foot out of the way a millisecond before the kunai would have struck, pinning it to the Dojo's straw _tatami_ mat. A note fluttered from where it was tied to the base of the handle, and even without reading it, she had a good guess as to what it was about. Casually looking up from the weapon, to the one who had thrown it, Shampoo made only a half hearted effort at looking innocent. 

"Read it," Ukyou growled from where she stood at the far end of the dueling room. Unruffled by the other girl's anger, Shampoo did as requested, and slowly reached down to retrieve the steel narrow throwing knife. She wasn't particularly impressed by it, or any weapon of Japanese design. Chinese throwing knives were much more elegant, in her humble opinion.

Unrolling the attached note, Shampoo saw Konatsu's feminine script.

Amused, Shampoo read the note aloud, "Dearest Ukyou, please accept this invitation with an open heart and mind. I have come to the conclusion that, for there to be any change in how we see each other, we must find the truth that exists between us. As you must know, a martial artist can only ever express his true self in combat. Fighting defines our lives by whether the steps we take prepare us or lead us astray, and we find our truth in that struggle. I want to show you the real me, and this is the only way left. Please accept this notice of challenge for the twenty first of November, this eighteenth year of the Heisei, barring interruption on account of an emergency."

The Amazon girl then rolled the note back up, and shrugged. "Boys will be boys."

"Don't play dumb with me! I know you had a hand in this!" Ukyou jabbed an accusing finger in Shampoo's direction. "Konatsu would never come up with something like this himself!"

"Are you sure about that?" Shampoo asked smugly. "Maybe you don't know him as well as you think."

Ukyou chose to ignore that remark, which could have been truer than she wanted to admit. "Damnit! Why don't you fight me yourself?"

"Hmf!" Shampoo scoffed contemptuously. "Why should I, when I can get someone else to make the point for me? This way, I'm left completely blameless."

"And what point is that? That you're not just a cheap Chinese bimbo?"

As always, that particular comment got a sneer from the Amazon.

"I intend to drive home to Ranma, to everyone here…" She tossed the kunai back to Ukyou in a lazy arc. "That you're the weakest member of our team. And when you accept that fact, when you realize you aren't fit to compete with someone like me, the problems in our group will evaporate. Don't you get it? To operate effectively, any group needs a clear hierarchy. It is time we sort out ours!"

Ukyou easily caught the throwing knife in her left hand. "You…!"

"But I consider myself to be a fair person," Shampoo added, enjoying herself. Her great grandmother wasn't the only one who could come up with schemes that took advantage of other's wants and ambitions. "Let's make a little wager, shall we? If…"

"If I beat Konatsu," Ukyou interrupted, before Shampoo could set forth her own terms. "I want you to put aside your pursuit of Ranma so long as we work here. And if I lose, I'll do the same."

Shampoo didn't like the finality of what her rival had suggested, and she immediately wondered if the okonomiyaki chef had already managed to draw up some kind of backroom deal with Konatsu. It was possible, even though the ninja boy would have nothing to gain by letting Ukyou continue to pursue Ranma. Ukyou could be a crafty opponent when she wasn't blinded by her emotions. Was this a trick or a bluff?

"Agreed, however…" Shampoo carefully stipulated. "The deal will be annulled if Ranma believes Konatsu has been holding back."

"Fine by me!" Ukyou turned on her heel and glowered at Shampoo behind her back. "That's the way I want it anyway. I want to fight for something; I want to see how much it means to me when it counts!"

And with that, she left.

'Watch me, Great grandmother…' As Ukyou stomped out of the room, Shampoo felt sure she had finally gotten the upper hand on her old enemy. 'Watch as I finally remove an old thorn from our side!'

* * *

Ryouga stared long and hard at the photographs. 

Behind her desk, Commander Yasuda cupped her hands together and waited a few more seconds; letting the young man digest the information he had been given. She studied his face, but found only a look of rock hard resolve. There was so smile, no smirk, no anger, no joy, no relief, no excitement. Against all human norms, he had to be masking his feelings; it was incomprehensible that he felt nothing at all about what lay before him.

"These are undoubtedly my parents," he confirmed her earlier question with a steely tone of voice. There was the proof she had looked for. Whatever his feelings were, he had buried them in a deep grave and covered it with a thick layer of concrete. She briefly wondered if he was the right person to send, but it seemed that his team was currently the most qualified to deal with uncooperative martial arts types.

When she spoke, her voice was equally impersonal. "We'll wait for them to show up again. When they do, I want your team ready to move."

A picture of a man and a woman peeked out from beneath Ryouga's fingers.

"Yes, ma'am."


	31. Room for Improvement I

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. With Ghost Wire in place, the two teams wait for their next set of orders to strike. Ukyou searches out help for her upcoming duel with Konatsu, Kuno gets a new blade, Ranma mulls over his Command, the aliens once again test human airspace, and the stage is set for two major confrontations to come.

* * *

**The Road To Cydonia**  
Chapter XI  
_Room for Improvement_

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

"You're proving unreliable."

"Sorry, sorry, but this condition isn't entirely unexpected."

"So where are you, exactly?"

"Out in the middle of nowhere I'm afraid."

"Well… stay put for now. Someone will be along shortly to fix your problem."

"And after that? Should I move on to the next one?"

"That's probably for the best. We'll take care of things here."

Two cell phones closed at the same time, a hundred miles apart.

* * *

**From**: Drctr. Weissman  
**Sent**: Tuesday, November 14, 2006, 18:02  
**To**: SLt. Hibiki Ryouga  
**Subject**: Your Request  
**Attached**:

Your request to be present for or to participate in the interrogation of Non-Terrestrial Subject BX31-06 is denied. Your suggestions into lines of investigation have been noted and taken into advisement. If you have further questions regarding this decision, feel free to schedule a meeting or videoconference.

You will be kept abreast of any pertinent developments that arise.

Attached is a copy of your request form and our response for your own records.

--

Director Andrew Weissman  
Special Research and Intelligence Division  
UNETCO Far East Command  
Ext. 2708 - phone  
Ext. 2709 – fax

* * *

Tatewaki Kuno didn't like to wait. Abstractly, he knew patience, like perseverance, was a virtue, but the latter came to him far more naturally than the former. It didn't help that he had just woken up and, checking his email, received a certain piece of news he had been waiting anxiously for. Even more so than those new pictures of her sister that Nabiki had promised, he had been waiting for this message.

Even before meeting with the rest of his team for morning training, he wanted to get this matter out of the way. Indeed, the noble scion of House Kuno hoped to surprise his new comrades. They were a strange bunch, all of generally low breeding and little class, but like the fellows of his Kendo Club he had grown somewhat used to their presence (call it de-sensitization). Additionally, as much as it galled him to admit it, he had come to realize that he needed to make a few… adjustments to his fighting style to avoid appearing, to the **ignorant **observer, as a junior member of the group.

For a long time, he had not given much thought to being outclassed by peers. He had always been a genius with a sword, and in kendo (that most noble and worthy martial pursuit) he had rapidly outstripped the competition to the point where he purposefully refrained from using his more powerful techniques in official matches. Then Ranma Saotome, that vile womanizing fiend, had appeared and ruined his perfect record of victories.

Without even a sword!

Disdain for hand to hand combat ran deep into the core of his being, and Kuno still found it difficult to take the idea seriously. All the great samurai were known for their skill with the blade. It was a sign of status in society. What, really, was the point of being so skilled in vulgar karate or whatnot, when a true man could find both form and function in the unrivaled beauty of the katana? Bare handed fighting seemed so uncouth and undignified, not to mention slipshod and undisciplined.

In time, there had come others in addition to Saotome, but they weren't really ever a concern. What reason would he, Tatewaki Kuno, have to compare himself to the likes of Mousse or Ryouga Hibiki? None! At least until recently. As the saying went, 'a miracle happens only once.' Ranma and his accursed trickery had beaten him before, but then, coming here, he had been forced to realize in practice bout after practice bout that the others were similarly skilled. It was a grave injustice, and then **it** had happened.

Kuno took a deep breath, and silently thanked the gods for the wondrous armor that UNETCO had given him in that first mission. His resulting injuries had been minor for the most part, but the Kuno Family Sword had not been as fortunate. The sword itself (one of two Treasure Swords in their possession) had been over four hundred years old, dating from the Suo-Koto Period of sword design. In retrospect, bringing it into such a dangerous situation may not have been particularly… wise. Especially when a cheaper sword could have been just as useful, and its loss wouldn't have been missed.

But it wasn't the crude cruelty of this new battlefield that was to blame.

His pride and nothing else had destroyed the Kuno Family Treasure Sword.

The tragedy of that (and the disgrace he'd brought to himself) aside, he'd quickly considered having a _Ningen Kokuho_ craft a new blade for his use in this battle against evil. One of these men, a 'Living National Treasure' of Japan, could surely provide a sword of nearly equal magnificence… but it would take time, and there was no guarantee that blade would fare any better in practical use. With the Kuno fortune he could just buy another appropriate sword from one of many collectors he knew, but the thought of another great old blade, made by a Master of a previous era, disappearing in a flash of alien plasma – it filled his mouth with bile.

Mousse had inadvertently provided another option. The master of Hidden Weapons had been making use of the UNETCO engineering facilities since his arrival, and he had been most forthcoming with the details of how his new accessories were fabricated. Discretely, Kuno had decided to pay the local machine and metalworks a visit, and make a few (not quite so) subtle inquiries into what they could and could not provide for a warrior in need of a new blade.

Now, it seemed, it would finally see the results firsthand.

The thought sent goose bumps up his arms. The email had indicated that the sword was ready for use and that he could come by "whenever" to pick it up. Apparently, there was to be no ceremony or other ritual surrounding the sword's construction and presentation. The man who had made it considered it an amusing distraction from working on other, probably more complex, contraptions. Kuno wasn't sure he liked that, since much of a sword's true value lay in its harmony with the notions of creation and destruction, but he could understand the value of pragmatism under these difficult and trying circumstances.

So, for once reigning in his natural impulse to burst loudly upon the scene and let all present know of his munificent arrival, he waited and spent the time looking around the workshop. Truly, the place was a miracle of technology. Some form of lathing machine whirred at the command of one of the local personnel, as what looked like silvery wire wound around and around some sort of cylinder. Elsewhere, the insides of a large machine were left bare, revealing a complex arrangement of metallic tubes and electronic gadgetry. Kuno massaged his temples. It was all rather confusing and unnerving, and he hoped to take his leave as soon as possible.

It wasn't that he didn't respect the work being done here – these men, after all, likely built that armor which had saved his life – but he felt terribly out of place. Science and the like did not appeal to him. He was a man born to the wrong era; his inspiration and academic interest were largely limited to the more liberal fields of history: traditional Japanese poetry and theater. It didn't help that he just wasn't very good at anything else.

After only a few minutes, he grew bored and anxious, and started to meander around, looking for a familiar face. What he found, eventually, was a familiar back of the head. The man who he'd expected to come and meet him by the workshop entrance (he had, in a reply email, announced that he would be by promptly) was busy, hunched over a disassembled rifle of some sort. A few moments of plumbing his memory produced a picture from his orientation on advanced weapons: it was one of the plasma based guns, an almost direct copy off of a vile alien design.

Kuno cleared his throat, but not so loudly as to be vulgar.

The man held up his right hand in the universal gesture of 'just a minute' as he returned to the weapon. What he was doing, Kuno couldn't imagine. He had training and implanted knowledge about how to maintain and disassemble conventional firearms, but none of the advanced non-projectile ones. He held in his anxiousness, and waited just a little longer.

Finally, the man made a loud 'hrrumph' sound and slid back on his chair before turning around to face his visitor. He was a large man, but not heavy set, with a short dark black beard that made it seem as if that hair had migrated straight from the bald top of his head. His features were craggy, and Kuno had thought initially that he had the demeanor of a blacksmith. He was a foreigner (from Germany or Austria or maybe Poland, Kuno wasn't too sure) which made asking him for help in making a new sword all the more surreal. This was about as far from a wizened master sword smith as it got.

"Ah, Tatewaki! There you are!" The man greeted the scion of House Kuno with a hearty slap on the arm and laughed jovially. Hans Fischbach was the man's name, and he was the Senior Fabrication Technician for Seiran Mountain. Apparently, Mousse had befriended him very quickly, and he had taken a special interest in the 'cute little toys' the Chinese martial artist had wanted crafted.

"Yes. Here I am," Kuno replied in English, but his tone made it clear he wasn't sure how to reply to Hans' exclamation. He was here, wasn't he? What was there to say?

"Come, come!" Hans gestured for him to follow, and Kuno did as he walked around to an apparently empty workstation. The older man then flipped open a panel, and the fingers of his right hand rapidly punched in some sort of identification key or command. A second later, a large pane in the wall opened up, revealing a large container of deep blue fluid… and standing in the vat of liquid, held in place with clamps, was a sword.

"No bubbles. Good. I'll drain the tank, and let you handle her yourself. Here we go…"

Kuno nodded eagerly, and watched as the blue liquid began to disappear. The level lowered and lowered, and finally disappeared entirely. It must have been pretty viscous, because not a single drop adhered to the walls of the vat or the sword itself. Hans then reached out, opened the chamber, and carefully freed the weapon with a cloth scarf.

Holding it out with a knowing smirk, Hans let the younger man gently remove it from his hands. Feeling the weight, Kuno confirmed that it was very light, probably only a kilogram, and then he fully took in the other attributes. It looked to be around 26 inches, or 66 centimeters long, making it a little shorter than the average _katana_. The hilt was that of the family sword, at least on the outside, but there was a new hand guard (still in the shape of a rectangle but with two holes on either side), and an attached tassel of red and white cloth reminiscent of a baby phoenix's tail.

The point was curved to a long tip, an _o-kissaki_, similar to what he had asked for but not exactly like he had imagined at the time. The curvature was centered on the middle of the blade (making it _tori sori_), rather than the bottom, just as he had requested. He'd expected there to be little taper, but looking now, he saw that there was almost none between the _hamachi_ and the _yokote_ (virtually the entire length of the sword), making it rather wide. A single perfect groove ran down the right side but not the left, and Kuno wondered how its _tachikaze_ would sound when it was swung.

"The sword is a combination of exotic alloys and a scandium-aluminum alloy I used as the stable core, which also evened out the weight," Hans explained, while Kuno eyed the new tool of his trade. "It's of basically uniform density, so you won't get as much bend out of this as you would a regular sword, but it won't chip or break – it isn't brittle - and the metal itself is corrosion resistant. Blood won't be a problem. Hell, sulfuric acid wouldn't be a problem. The edge is plasma treated and in Phase One or Two it's just a couple molecules thick."

"The _hamon_ is decorative?" Kuno asked, meaning the temper line so distinctive to a true Japanese _katana_.

"Yeah," Hans replied with a stiff nod. "I figured you'd want that, so I colored the plasma I used to treat it."

The younger man took one last look at the simple but telling waves that ran the length of the blade and bowed deeply in thanks. Senior Fabrication Technician Fischbach returned the gesture with a hearty laugh and pat on the shoulder.

"Don't sweat it, my friend!" he said, obviously not one for deep or solemn propriety. "Besides, you haven't even tried out the special memory metal features yet! Go on!"

Raising his head, Kuno's smirk grew very wide indeed. "As yes, good smith, I had nearly forgotten about _those_…"

* * *

Ukyou was more than a little surprised to bump into Kasumi on the way to the Dojo Facility. She hadn't had much interaction with the oldest Tendo daughter over the years; unlike Akane and Nabiki, Kasumi never visited the restaurant, indeed she hardly ever seemed to leave the Tendo residence, and she wasn't particularly talkative as far as Ukyou knew. The only time they'd really exchanged more than basic pleasantries had been a brief few days during the Secret Sauce Incident.

Standing alone with her in the elevator, she saw that Kasumi was in her work clothes, dressed like a nurse, meaning she was either between shifts at the moment or she had business somewhere outside the medical wing. Noticing the other girl's attention, Kasumi smiled warmly. It was the kind of smile, with eyes closed and the whole face put into it, that sometimes came off as a little off putting (or condescending) because it didn't seem entirely natural that someone could be so pleasant so often.

The world could be coming to an end, and Kasumi would find a way to smile.

Or that was the impression Ukyou had of her.

"Are those drinks?" the okonomiyaki chef asked, deciding to strike up a little conversation and satisfy her curiosity at the same time.

"I thought the boys would be a little thirsty from all their exercise," Kasumi replied, and Ukyou couldn't believe that she had just called martial arts training 'exercise.' As if it was calisthenics or something. "I was making the trip there anyway, so I brought them some drinks."

"You're headed to the dojo?" Ukyou asked, though it was a question that had already been answered. "I'm going there myself."

"Oh?" Kasumi tilted her head slightly, like a bird. "I thought Ranma's group didn't practice until the afternoon?"

"I'm actually going to meet up with the 'lost boys,' not my own squad," Ukyou snickered a little at the joke.

Kasumi's smile remained exactly the same, leading Ukyou to believe she either didn't get the reference, or didn't care for it. Who could tell with her?

"Well, that's nice," the slightly older girl answered evasively. Ukyou briefly toyed with the idea of explaining or pressing home the play on words, but ultimately sighed and let it be. Kasumi was a strange one. Her motives were either extremely transparent, or very well hidden; it was impossible to tell which. Ukyou just considered herself fortunate that Akane had ended up becoming Ranma's fiancé instead of Kasumi. The other girl was just way too mild and agreeable, at least on the surface.

They left the elevator and walked the rest of the way in relative silence. Ukyou trailed a little behind Kasumi, as the older girl hummed sweetly. Noting again the four glasses of liquid on the metal tray in Kasumi's hands, Ukyou wondered whether she should have brought some kind of peace offering as well. It wasn't as if she was good friends with any of the guys, nor (as she thought more about it) were they under any strong inclination to help her. Up until a few seconds ago, she had considered just barging in and asking to be as effective a tactic as any. In the past, she had given Ryouga and Mousse food to wet their appetites for a new break-up-Ranma-and-Akane scheme, but she doubted that would be a powerful incentive here, where they got all the food they wanted for free.

Perhaps, in retrospect, she should have gone through a little more effort to get to know them. As it was, even Shampoo had a better network of contacts to rely on at the moment. Mousse would jump through flaming hoops for his 'beloved Shampoo,' and the only other person besides Ranma that Ukyou could ask for help was the very person she needed to train to fight. And Ranma, upon hearing of the upcoming duel, had been more exasperated than she'd imagined, and he had plainly stated that he couldn't and wouldn't take sides between members of his team. Her pride would never let her go to Genma for help after how he had ruined her life, and she doubted Soun could help much, so that left the other four boys of India Squad.

Finally, the Dojo came into sight.

Pinned on a wall nearby was a signup schedule for individual sessions as well as general classes. There were a handful of names up in English, but there weren't any that Ukyou recognized. Inside, she saw Mr. Tendo and another man going over some sort of move involving a rifle. Ukyou didn't imagine that the Tendo Ryu normally used rifles or handguns as part of their weapon lineup, but the School of Anything Goes was nothing if not adaptable. The motion the man was using reminded her of a kodachi's when held in a reverse grip.

The only other person in the room was Akane, looking a little disheveled in her white practice gi. Seeing the two of them enter, she waved her hand and headed over on an intercept course. Kasumi slipped off her shoes while standing and Ukyou did the same a few seconds later.

"Hi there, you guys!" Akane greeted them cheerfully. "What's up?"

Ukyou had noticed a certain spring in Akane's step over the last few days that she couldn't recall from before. Even around Shampoo, her behavior had become less… confrontational. It was hard to pin down exactly, but it seemed likely that Akane's confidence had increased lately. Ukyou couldn't imagine why, especially since the youngest Tendo daughter hadn't been considered strong enough to sign on for combat duty. Almost everyone knew Akane had been practicing on her own, she could even be seen occasionally at the shooting range, but Ukyou had a gut feeling that there was more to it than that.

Well, it didn't really matter at the moment.

"Hey, Akane," Ukyou returned the greeting with a little bow of her head.

"Akane-chan," Kasumi said, simply. "How was the morning class?"

Ukyou hadn't been going to ask, but she was curious as well, and she listened as Akane replied, "Pretty good. Everyone who comes has already had a lot of previous training, but they're all from very different backgrounds. Most are western Special Forces types, so they come to practice on us and pick up some new tricks. They aren't really here to learn much about the school or its tenets, so dad doesn't even bother."

"What about yourself?" Kasumi asked. "Are you learning anything?"

"Sure," Akane answered easily. "I've met a lot of nice people, and they're helping me get weapons certification."

Ukyou frowned a bit at that. Akane had met people and made friends here? Akane! A brief flash of jealousy came and went, though just a sliver of it lingered in the back of her thoughts. Akane had obviously taken advantage of being left behind to tend to the new Dojo to make new friends, and those friends were helping her get onto the firing line, no doubt so she could be closer to Ranma. That wasn't good. And what did it say about Ukyou Kuonji that she didn't have any real friends besides her fiancé and a guy who was obsessed with her, while Akane had already stated to insinuate herself into the base community?

Akane and Kasumi chatted a little more, and Ukyou missed most of it, until she heard something that caught her attention again.

"They've become pretty secretive about what they're doing in there, actually," Akane said, answering a question Ukyou hadn't caught. "They keep the see-through tinted and the door locked. Even put up a 'do not disturb' sign."

"So we can't get in?" Ukyou blurted out, and it occurred to her that Akane didn't know why she was even here. She explained, "I was hoping to get their opinion on something."

"You mean your fight against Konatsu?" Akane asked, and Ukyou's eyes widened.

"How did you…?"

"Ranma told me." Akane didn't elaborate beyond that. "Anyway, you can ask, but they'll probably just ignore you."

"They'll let me in," Kasumi assured her sister. "Besides, I'm here on Doctor Pearson's orders."

Akane gasped. "Is someone hurt?"

Kasumi's ever smiling face faded and took on a more disapproving look.

"Probably," she said.

"Well, let's go see," Akane said and led them over to the flat metal door that separated the Dojo proper from the private dueling and training section. She activated the intercom. "Hey, Kasumi's here. Ukyou, too."

For a few seconds there was no reply.

Then Ryu's voice: "…are here! Put that away you idiot!"

Followed by mad laughter that could only come from Kuno. "Accept your punishment with dignity, you cur!"

And: "Damnit! Hold on, just a second."

The three girls exchanged dubious looks. On second thought, maybe it had been wise to keep the door locked. Knowing those four, who knew what kind of madness was going on inside. A massive melee of flying bandannas and vacuum blades and ki attacks and razor wire and weighted chains filled Ukyou's mind, and she definitely didn't want to be the one to stumble unprepared into that kind of mess. On the other hand, it got her a little excited, too. It would be good to fight someone besides Shampoo for real.

The door eventually opened, and it did look as if a hurricane had hit a weapons factory before exhausting itself on the walls and floor of the room. _Tatami_ mats were torn up and upended, and while the walls themselves were mostly unmarked, that was by virtue of the fact that they were essentially indestructible. You could have enough C4 to level a building go off in the room, and the room would remain intact. An embedded speaker in one of the room's walls seemed tuned into an American radio station, probably bounced in from one of the US military bases like Misawa in the north.

Mousse seemed busy stomping on Kuno's head, but his robe was torn in several places and blood leaked down his left arm. Standing next to the door, Ryu also looked ragged – his hair was frizzled up, and a head wound leaked blood over his left eye. Ryouga also stood nearby, the fighting tape and bandages on his arms and hands looking either burned or bloodstained or both.

Kasumi 'tsked' and put on her best face, though her tone was mildly scolding, as if the boys had been caught roughhousing in the living room. "Is this a good time to take a break? I'd like to take at look at all of you."

"Is that lemonade?" Ryu rushed up to her with puppy dog eyes. "It IS lemonade!"

"I guess it is about _that _time," Ryouga seconded, licking his lips at the cool drinks that had interrupted Hurricane India Squad.

"This isn't over until he cries uncle!" Mousse stomped on the back of Kuno's head again, and grinded his foot savagely. "Give up, Kuno! You're a ten years too early to be challenging the likes of me!"

"Roguish vagabond! None may tread upon the head of Tatewaki Kuno!"

Kuno rolled out from under Mousse's foot, and the second his knees touched the ground, he propped himself back up on them, and then onto his feet. He wasn't particularly agile, but he knew how to take and recover from a fall. He held up a metallic _bokken_ in a wide stance different from his normal kendo. Ukyou recognized it as the prelude to the _Hirazuki_, a powerful parallel sword thrust technique developed by the assistant leader of the _Shinsengumi_, Toshizo Hijikata.

"Defend yourself!" Sure enough Kuno's legs tensed under his torn _hakama_, and he thrust at Mousse as the Chinese boy parried the blow and tried to slip out to the side.

Mousse obviously wasn't familiar with the technique himself (not too surprising given his background), and he was caught by surprise when Kuno's thrust shifted seamlessly into a perpendicular slash. Still, the agile Chinese martial artist was not to be underestimated, and he flipped back into a one handed stand before kicking out with his legs wide. Kuno jumped back, parrying Mousse's spinning legs with his _bokken_ to the unmistakable sound of metal on metal. From the sound, and knowing him, Ukyou could guess that Mousse had some sort of blades hidden in his shoes.

Typical.

"Come on, you guys," Ryu carefully stood between them and Kasumi, just in case bladed metal started to fly. "Give it a minute's rest!"

Mousse flipped back onto his feet, and looked briefly over his shoulder and then back at Kuno. The Kendoist sported a confident smile, despite the footmark over half of his face, a bloody nose and a black eye.

"The day is soon upon you when you will regret your taunts and foolish words, my friend!" Kuno chuckled and struck a dramatic pose. "And after I have dealt with you, I shall go and liberate the pigtailed girl and Akane Tendo from the thrall of that vile Saotome!"

Then, he squinted at something over Mousse's shoulder. "Akane Tendo!"

Rushing past his opponent, he quickly embraced the object of his obsessive affection, rubbing his cheek into her hair. He only had a second to enjoy holding her in his arms, before the youngest Tendo's fist had a reunion with his chin and sent him head over heels like a bowling pin. Sprawled out on the floor, Kuno grumbled something unintelligible, but probably to the effect of, 'Love hurts, especially your love, my fiery huntress…'

"Ah, lemonade!" Mousse commented, walking over and fixing his hair with a comb he had retrieved from… who knew where? He was Mousse. Sometimes it seemed like he had anything and everything jammed up his sleeves, and that the hard thing was finding it once it was in there. Then, Kasumi unwrapped a small paper package, and the three conscious members of India Team gasped.

Rice Krispies Treats!

"Thank you, Kasumi!" The three boys chorused as they took their drinks and snacks. Ukyou shook her head. Were these really the guys she'd planned to ask for help? A bunch of numbskulls easily bribed by a smile, a drink, and a kiddy snack? She wasn't sure what was more pathetic: them acting like that, or her going to them for training.

What a bunch of stooges; she'd have never thought that they could have worked together as a group before. Ryouga had always been a brooding and moody love struck fool, getting into a fight with anyone who spoke ill of Akane, while Mousse had always been so obsessed with winning Shampoo's love that it interfered with whatever life he normally would have had. Ryu seemed normal enough, for a martial artist, but now he was starting to become more like his new buddies.

And Kuno was… well, Kuno.

"Oh, my!" Kasumi said, looking closely at Mousse's arm. "You may need some stitches for that, Mousse. Let's have a look at you right away."

"Um, sure…" Mousse walked off a ways and sat down. Kasumi sat demurely next to him, and took out a small case from the medical kit she had brought with her on a clip at her hip. The Chinese boy held his drink with his right hand while Kasumi carefully tended to his wound. Oddly, Ryouga watched the scene rather than stare at Akane, which was what Ukyou had expected him to do.

Hell, as long as she had known the lost boy, he had never been able to keep a cool head around his secret love. Even later, when he hooked up with Akari, he would stutter and lose what little cool he had whenever Akane was in the general area. Now, though, to Ukyou's complete bewilderment, he opted to watch Kasumi clean up Mousse's blood rather than twiddle his fingers and hope for a scrap of Akane's attention. What the hell had happened to him?

A quick look at Akane confirmed that the other girl was also a little perplexed by this change in behavior. Amazingly, it was Ryu who spoke up, and he was the guy who they were least familiar with.

"I'd expected you to be around, Akane, but not you, Ukyou," Ryu said between drinks. He winked his left eye shut, as a bit of blood almost dribbled into it. "What's the occasion? Ranma want something?"

"Nooo," Ukyou replied a little heatedly. Why did he think Ranma had sent her? "I came for my own reasons."

"Ah! This must be about that duel next week," he inferred.

Ukyou groaned and hid her face in her hands. "Geez! Does everyone know!"

"Well, Shampoo did send out that email to everyone about it," Ryu explained, not noticing how Ukyou twitched at the name of her rival and constant source of frustration. "And then Nabiki got wind of it, and started to place odds on who would win… and then there was that email that she had to forward later about how gambling isn't permitted on the base…"

"Wonderful!" Ukyou ground her teeth together. "This is just great!"

"Well, look on the bright side!" Ryu said cheerfully. "You have a whole week to get ready. And it isn't as if losing the duel will force you to seal up your entire repertoire of techniques because some idiot thinks they're 'evil.'"

He and Akane exchanged looks that Ukyou didn't quite understand, and then he shrugged. Ukyou knew he was talking about Ranma, and how he had been forced to seal the _Yamasenken_ Techniques, and she guessed that Akane had been there for things as well. She did have a habit of insinuating herself into Ranma's disputes for some reason or another.

"Yes, well, I do have a week, and I'd like to pick up some pointers from you guys," Ukyou finally just out and said it. "I can't ask Ranma, because then he'd have to take sides against Konatsu, and he won't as the leader of our team. So I was wondering if you guys could help me out…"

"If you're going to train Ukyou," Akane interrupted. "I'd like to get involved, too."

Ryu dithered, and took a long drink that didn't actually seem to involve him lowering the water level of his lemonade. Ryouga looked at them out of the corner of his eye, and sighed. It had been obvious from the beginning that by 'you guys' they had meant mostly him. Not that Ryu and Mousse weren't also skillful fighters… it was just that Ryouga was more of a familiar face, despite his faults. And besides, next to Ranma, he was probably the strongest guy around.

"Akane-san…" Ryouga said her name with his usual amount of over-generous respect, which at least brought up some similarities to the him Ukyou had gotten used to. "Ukyou. I have the utmost respect for both of you, but I don't believe looking to me for help is the wisest course of action."

In other words: no.

Ukyou couldn't believe it, and by the look on Akane's face, neither could she. Sure, they hadn't gotten along with him too well ever since that Cursed Tunnel of Lost Love affair, but to turn down helping Akane, too? It was unprecedented! Ukyou stared at him, and for an instant the angle of his face, the coldness of his attitude, reminded her of when they had first met… when he had thought of her as a boy, and as someone daring to get in the way of his fight with Ranma.

Was that how he saw her now? As an obstacle in the way of his revenge?

"Ryouga…" Akane said, and Ukyou could see him relent just a fraction. It wasn't his normal reaction, but it was close. It wasn't his normal shyness, though. It was almost as if he had thought of something, and it made him feel… guilty. It wasn't the first time he'd been that way at the mention of Akane, and Ukyou had supposed it was because he'd almost killed her back when he'd had his first fight with Ranma.

"Both of you are at the point where what you really need to learn can't be taught," he tried to explain, looking at the two girls. "Ukyou, you could do to broaden your technique and learn some new tricks… but to take the next step in your training, you need to find how to conceptualize your ki. And Akane, you still have to learn how to use your spiritual presence. I can't teach you how to do that. Both are concepts you have to grasp for yourselves."

Ukyou did understand that, having learned to tap into her ki already, at least to a basic degree. Akane, however, didn't quite get it.

"What do you mean: use my spiritual presence?" Akane asked. "Dad said something like that, too, and Mr. Saotome."

"It isn't easy to describe…" Ryouga began to say.

So Ryu jumped in. "Think of it this way. When you're born, you instinctively know how to move your body, but not how to coordinate those movements. In the same way, you are born knowing how to create ki, or spiritual presence, but not how to coordinate its movement or direction. Before anything else, you need to learn how to move it around inside your body. Most of us learn that through a near death experience."

Ryouga nodded. "A martial artist can only truly advance if he or she risks everything, including their life. You understand this, don't you, Ukyou?"

"Yeah," Ukyou agreed. "I remember when it happened to me. I had been training against the sea, and as the weather got worse, I took up the challenge instead of turning in. I stayed up all night, and a few times I lost my footing, hit my head, and almost passed out. That was when my body learned how to really use ki."

"Ranma probably learned it during his Nekoken training," Ryouga interjected. "Which was why he was so fast when we met in junior high school. I was ten when it happened to me."

"I was thirteen," Ryu added. "It was during a duel."

"You see, Akane-san," Ryouga cut in again. "This isn't like eating some magical noodles or wearing a battle _dougi_. There is no short cut."

"I'm not looking for a short cut!" Akane exclaimed, but she could see that the others weren't convinced. Really, it was clear that even she wasn't completely convinced. "I just want to be able to help…"

"You don't have to be like this, like **us**, to help," Ryouga said, but didn't elaborate. "Just be yourself."

"Ugggghhh…" A loud groan came from the ground, as Tatewaki Kuno slowly eased himself off the ground. "Akane Tendo, your love is a formidable thing indeed…"

"Hey, Kuno, here!" Ryouga knelt down and handed the Blue Thunder the extra drink and plastic wrapped snack he'd been holding while Kasumi tended to Mousse's arm.

"My thanks," the older fighter took the glass. "Ah, lemonade, the cure to a parched throat! Just like my twisted sister used to make, but hopefully without the varied and debilitating poisons…"

At that, the assembled teens sweat-dropped at the poor kendoist's family life.

"However, I am unfamiliar with this other confection," Kuno finished saying, missing whatever looks of pity he may have received. Taking a bite of it, however, he didn't complain – which for Kuno was itself a compliment.

"Ok," Ryouga said, standing back up. "Look, I'll make a deal with you two. I don't think I can be of any help, but…"

With his now free hand, he unwound two bandannas from his head. Holding them between his thumb and index finger, he snapped them straight and sent a strong burst of _ki_ into the fabric. The trick was still impressive to watch, showing the lost boy's mastery over a well known but very difficult technique. Even Ranma hadn't replicated it, and the pigtailed one had an eidetic memory for learning and copying martial arts techniques.

"If either of you can break the ki seal on one of these bandannas in the next half hour, then I'll do what I can to get you to the next level of your training." He held out the bandannas, and both Ukyou and Akane took one. Ukyou had never actually gotten a hold of one of Ryouga's bandannas before, and initially trying to bend it proved impossible. It was as rigid and hard as tempered steel.

She also noted Ryouga's hands.

So, apparently, did Kasumi. She was back, and with a vengeance. Ryu was given a bit of gauze to hold to the wound over his left eye, and Ryouga was led away to a corner where she could see 'what was left of his poor fingers.' She was plainly unhappy and critical of the lost one's latest training, and from what Ukyou overhead, so was Doctor Pearson, the medical officer who had been put in charge of the two new squads.

She looked down at the bandanna in her hands. "Thirty minutes, huh?"

"Akane Tendo, let us share this strange new foodstuff and bask in the warm glow of each other's company!"

Clonk! "In your dreams!"

"Were you two married in a previous life or something?"

"Our love transcends the boundaries of reincarnation…"

"Don't encourage him!"

* * *

The two figures stood over the motionless body.

"Is he…?" one asked, in a woman's voice.

The other kneeled down, and touched two fingers to his fallen form's throat.

"Yes," was the man's answer.

The woman sighed, and rested her hands on her hips. She flicked her long brown hair, and looked out across what was left of the inner shrine. It was dark, with the candles that had been lit now extinguished, but some features were still plain to see. Two large scrolls hung from the walls, though one had a tear in it. An Amitabha statue sat on its perch, unharmed in its meditation _mudra _with thumbs touching and fingers together, offering only silent contemplation of the ruin that had befallen the area around it. The ground and ceiling had been torn up, and pale blue prayer beads were scattered around and embedded in the walls.

"What happened?" She asked, rolling one of the beads around between her fingers. "Was it his one of his techniques or ours?"

Outside, in an herb garden, a bamboo _shikaoi _water cup tipped lazily.

"That is what I'm looking into."

While he did so, the woman held the wooden bead up to eye level. Japanese Buddhist monks often carried prayer beads of 112 beads, calling them _juzu_ (instead of the more continental _mala_), representing one's progress on the path towards enlightenment.

"I wonder if, in the end, he saw the pure land of _jìngtŭ _where he was to be reborn?" The woman mused, using the Chinese term for the mythical land in the west.

"…Probably not," she concluded. "But did you see the serene look on his face when he fell?"

"Natural state humans will believe the most baffling things," the man replied, and stood up. "Severe systolic heart failure and internal bleeding. It also seems that second attack of yours caused a pulmonary edema. I can treat the latter, but not the former. It seems we've lost this one."

"You could have been a bit gentler, you know, given his old age," the man quickly added with no small hint of criticism. "I would have expected you to be more sympathetic to his physical condition."

"Those who don't fight shouldn't criticize," the woman said haughtily. "And don't compare me to the likes of him. With all that spiritual power, he could have kept his body alive another hundred years or more, but instead he chose to accept death when it came for him. I could live another three hundred years, and I still would not understand Buddhists."

"No point crying over spilled milk I suppose." The man carefully removed his surgical gloves. "Were you able to decipher any of his techniques, or that sutra he used?"

"The Tsukiakari Nenbutsu (Moonlight Prayer to Amitabha) isn't a move you or I could use anymore," the woman answered, casually flicking the broken prayer bead onto the dead priest's body.

"Unfortunate," the man stated, and slowly walked towards the exit.

"Yes, but what can you do?" the woman wondered aloud, walking alongside the man and tucking her hands into her green rain slicker. "Which reminds me: In case I'm not able to tempt him, we should call in extra resources for this last one."

"That's probably wise."

"And then, once we're done here in Japan… I am so looking forward…"

They stepped into the bright light of the day.

"To finally going home…"


	32. Room for Improvement II

Akane found it interesting how each of India Squad practiced by themselves. For her, it was much more informative than watching a one on one or melee match. She'd been in quite a few duels as a representative of the Tendo branch of Anything Goes, but her personal training had always been somewhat less inspired than her enthusiasm for a formal fight. Nabiki had occasionally remarked that her little sister lacked patience for steadily accruing profit from an investment.

As she thought about it, Akane knew that was actually a rather apt comparison. Training was rarely about quantum leaps in ability gained after relatively little work. Most training needed patience and perseverance, doing the same grueling thing over and over, in the hope that it would pay off with a gradual improvement in some area of the Art, or in the development of a new technique. That may have been fine for some, but for Akane, who had hopes of maintaining normal friendships and a normal attendance in school and school programs, it was trying in the extreme, and had little effective appeal.

She just wasn't that obsessive.

She considered herself a martial artist, but that wasn't all she wanted to be in life. It was a definition of who she was, not THE definition. So, after a certain point, she hadn't really bothered with severe training anymore. Life had gotten in the way, and her father hadn't exactly been there to push her into totally devoting her life to the Art. So her training became relegated to breaking concrete blocks for stress relief, and doing the occasional _kata_. She had been top dog in Nerima for years, so what reason did she have to improve anyway?

Ryu Kumon had reserved a long stretch of the practice room for his training. His arms blurred as he fired off vacuum blade after vacuum blade at the far wall, where he had drawn a square in black magic marker. This was his technique training – he was working on something new, probably, or a derivation on the _Yamasenken_. Earlier, he had been engaged in what Akane had at first assumed was a _kata_. Now, she suspected it was physical training to be able to create vacuum blades with his legs as well as arms.

She had never trained like that.

Elsewhere, Mousse began to walk back to a position near the Kumon fighter. Both eventually had their backs to the same corner, and Akane knew what the Chinese martial artist was about to do. He had been practicing it for about twenty minutes now. Together, the two of them were monopolizing the north and west faces of the practice room with their dangerous techniques. It was no wonder the door had been locked.

"Head's up, everyone!" he called out, as a courtesy, and leveled his (now sewn up) right sleeve at the far wall. "Karasu Sansai Ha!"

His hand withdrew into the sleeve, and a ripple went through the fabric as a prelude to the 'Raven Storm Wave.' Mousse's left foot slid back, braced his body, and without further preamble his right sleeve erupted. Hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of slivers of metal filled the air in a wide cone before narrowing on a target set into the wall, painted over an upturned _tatami _mat. The straw mat shook as it took on the appearance of a flattened porcupine, riddled with glistening flechettes. When he was done, Mousse's sleeve was smoking, and he was breathing heavily, a savage grin on his face.

She had never trained like that.

Ryouga stood by another wall, but unlike the others he seemed to be practicing for in close combat. Arrayed against the wall, he had three metal targets, which after getting a close look, appeared to be hollow and filled with liquids. The lost boy struck them over and over, sometimes with his fists, sometimes with his palms, and all were marred by blood. One of them must have been super hot, too, because the thick liquid inside was bubbling like boiling water. It was definitely technique training, but for what, Akane couldn't guess. Though she suspected Kasumi, of all people, knew.

She had never trained like that, nor did she really want to.

Self mutilation had never really been high on her to-do list.

Even Kuno, after he had stopped making an ass of himself by trying to molest her, seemed to be showing vast improvement, though that was most likely due to his new weapon. He had called it _Tenrai Hououken_, or Heavenly Thunder Phoenix Sword, and he had been practicing with it all morning. Akane could guess that it was made of that strange alien metal that UNETCO was so fond of, since it didn't bend of deform, even when Kuno did his Blue Thunder Attack, jabbing with the sword so fast it became almost impossible to distinguish one strike from another. It was the most powerful and taxing move he had that she knew of, aside from his mostly useless ability to carve up watermelons with super speed.

Then, there was Ukyou, in the same boat as her, basically. At least as far as their current activities anyway. The _okonomiyaki_ chef had also been trying, like Akane, to undue whatever _ki_ technique Ryouga had used on his bandannas to no avail. The other girl had tried to break it with raw strength, and she had tried to cut it with her mini-spatulas, and her mega-spatula, all for naught. Then she had tried to jury rig something to hold the bandanna flat while she chopped and stomped away at it, again, with little or no progress. Wedging it in the door had been a good idea, but neither girl had anything strong enough to cut through the _ki _enhanced fabric.

Akane had tried raw strength, too, but she knew it wouldn't work. Thanks to the training Ryouga had given her two years ago, she had some basic guesses about the technique he had used: the _Tetsununo_ or Iron Cloth Technique. It was likely that it could be cut, but that wasn't what Ryouga had asked them to do anyway. He had said, "Break the ki seal" not snap it in half.

It was a test of _ki_ control.

"Both of you are at the point where what you really need to learn can't be taught," he had said. "Ukyou, you could do to broaden your technique and learn some new tricks… but to take the next step in your training, you need to find how to conceptualize your ki. And Akane, you still have to learn how to use your spiritual presence. I can't teach you how to do that. Both are concepts you have to grasp for yourselves."

Spiritual Presence and conceptualization of _ki_… was this a test for her, or for Ukyou? After all, Ukyou was further along on the road of _ki_ control than Akane was, so why give them the same test? Spiritual Presence was the direction of one's _ki_, into an object, or into another person, producing Spiritual Pressure. Conceptualization of _ki_ was more amorphous, and she wasn't sure exactly what it implied.

"Akane, remember: the ribbon is purely an extension of your body. It is not a weapon in and of itself," Ryouga had explained; back when she had asked him to teach her Martial Arts Rhythmic Gymnastics. "As a substitute for the hands, and the fists, you can attack with it, but that is not the essence of this Art. Find yourself in the ribbon, and you will be able to use it properly."

Akane closed her eyes and remembered how, like Ryouga, Kodachi had been able to use the ribbon to pick up other objects, even large ones. That part of Martial Arts Rhythmic Gymnastics had always eluded her. The ribbon did not naturally wrap around things like that, much less tighten enough to pick them up. Moreover, the ribbon was not made out of special material, and would probably snap if it suspended any appreciable weight.

"Find yourself in the ribbon," she repeated. "In the ribbon."

It must mean that you extrude your _ki_ into the fabric. But saying it and doing it were two totally different things. Only a ridiculous martial arts savant like Ranma could pick up a complex technique like that just by watching it and being given no-good cryptic advice! Then and there, the thought of how easily Ranma had picked up the style sent a flush of jealous anger through her body.

"No luck, huh?" Ukyou asked, sitting down opposite Akane with an exasperated huff. "What a rotten test!"

"There's probably some meaning to it," Akane said, taking in how worn down Ukyou looked. She wasn't totally sure how she felt about Ukyou, even after knowing her and going through two grades with her back in Furinkan. The chef was a perennial paramour of Ranma's, but when she wasn't chasing after her Ran-chan, she could be quite personable and friendly. Akane supposed she was more a 'good acquaintance and rival' than a real 'friend.' After all, a friend wouldn't try and steal your stupid jerk of a fiancé, or carpet bomb your wedding (not that you necessarily wanted to get married to said idiot fiancé, you just didn't **not **want to get married – yeah, that was it!).

"We have to try and break up the ki inside the bandanna," Akane continued, pushing aside the complexity of what passed for her personal life.

"That's pretty obvious. The question is how: imparting enough energy, kinetic energy, should do the trick. But it isn't." Ukyou sighed into her fist, and Akane reevaluated her impression of what the other girl had been doing. They'd both been in the same high school physics class, and in fact, Ukyou had done better in it than Akane had. If energy was energy, and "x" amount of _ki_ was keeping the material in its current shape, then "x" amount of any other sort of energy should… no.

No, that couldn't work.

"Except we need to remove energy from a system, not add to it," Akane speculated. "Like boiling water. Steam doesn't become water if you add energy to it. Water won't become ice if you hit it."

"But is this even like that?" Ukyou asked, giving Akane a bit more merit for making a potentially useful observation. "After all, things get harder – more solid – when they lose energy. So maybe adding energy is what we have to do."

"I… I dunno," Akane admitted. "I don't know if this works like that at all. There's no way to tell."

"No. I saw it," Ukyou said, remembering. "That jackass definitely put ki into this bandanna of his. Plus, he called it a seal. So it's definitely a matter of canceling the ki, or breaking the seal."

"Seal? You mean like a written sutra?" Akane asked, holding up her bandanna. There didn't seem to be any writing on it. Still, she and Ranma had done more than a few exorcisms in the past, and they had experience with using Shino and Buddhist seals, if not making them.

"I couldn't find any writing on mine either," Ukyou commented, also holding up her bandanna between her hands. "Maybe it was a metaphor?"

"Not a very helpful one," Akane scoffed. "Unless you're a miko or something,"

A moment of silence later and she felt the arms of a familiar and annoying kendoist envelop her.

"Akane Tendo, the thought of you in a _chihaya_ would be heaven on Earth," Kuno murmured happily (referring to the traditional shrine maiden outfit), a second before Akane gave him a five finger salute right on the kisser. He flipped over, feet twitching, a spray of blood arcing through the air.

Ukyou snapped her fingers. "Ah! What if the seal he mentioned is just the shape of the ki once in the cloth? Still, that means that breaking it is a matter of disrupting his ki with ours."

"Can you do that?" Akane asked, ignoring the upended and unconscious Kuno heir behind her. "Force ki into the bandanna?"

"If I could, I would have tried that already anyway," Ukyou grumbled.

The other girl lowered her eyes. "Oh..."

"I don't know how that jerk expects us to do this. He knows neither of us can extrude ki like that! He's just being an asshole driving it home like this!" Ukyou raged, fisting the air angrily.

"I can hear you guys, you know," a small voice came from over where Ryouga was practicing.

"She didn't mean it, Ryouga-kun!" Akane turned and waved him off, trying to sound as pleasant as possible. Behind her, Ukyou was still fuming like a kettle. The lost boy watched the scene with a deadpan sort of exacerbation before going back to his training.

"Ok, we only have a few more minutes," Akane quickly went back to the matter at hand, reigning in her own frustration. "There has to be some way to bring out enough ki to do this. How about a battle aura?"

"Too diffuse." Ukyou shook her head. "I tried and it didn't work."

"So we need a way to focus the ki?"

The _okonomiyaki_ chef dropped the bandanna she'd been holding and pounded a fist on it. "Oh, well, that should only take a few years of training to do…"

"Wait! Between us, we can do it!" Akane suddenly blurted out, and clapped her hands together. "We both have a battle aura, but we can't do anything with it by ourselves. But when the auras of two martial artists clash, they exert pressure between them."

"Like with the Hiryu Shoten Ha," Ukyou said, seeing where Akane was heading. Both girls had been present when Ranma had learned that ancient technique; both had seen the training, heard the theory, and seen it in action. When the battle auras of two powerful martial artists touched, they clashed and exerted force on one another. It was this resulting spiritual pressure that the Rising Dragon Ascension to Heaven took advantage of.

"Yosh!" Akane held out her hand, holding the bandanna Ryouga had given her in her palm. Ukyou then stood, and her palm met Akane's. Together, they summoned their fighting spirit, and flecks of red and blue began to manifest in the air around the two ladies. Feeling the rising power, Kuno looked up from where he lay on the floor, Mousse paused in collecting his flechettes, Ryu stopped in mid swipe, and Ryouga looked over his shoulder.

With a 'fwoosh'ing sound, the two auras snapped into full existence, and instantly began to compete and exert pressure on each other. Without even thinking, the two girls began to one up each other, until their hair began to move as a result of the building air currents. Between their right hands, the bandanna began to glow a fierce red, first along the edges, and then in an array of triangles along its surface. The energy swelled, the lines inflating, before…

Like a firecracker going off, the network of infused _ki _shattered in a spray of sparks. When Akane and Ukyou's hands parted ways, a limp bandanna fluttered to the ground, bathed in the light of their burning battle auras. Then, just as the formerly steel-hard cloth touched the floor, the spiritual pressure between the girls ebbed, and receded as their auras gently wavered and broke apart.

"Yes!" Akane whooped, gleefully jumping in the air. "Yes yes yes!"

"Looks like I owe you a drink, Ryu," Mousse commented, a smirk on his lips.

Ryu grinned right back. "These Nerima girls are a strange breed, that's for sure."

Then the two girls exchanged high fives, and Ukyou pointed at the lost boy and laughed triumphantly. "How do ya like that, huh? Thought we couldn't do it, didn'tya!"

The other guys looked to India Squad's leader for a response.

"Don't act like you have anything to celebrate," Ryouga said, and faced the two of them, crossing his arms defiantly. "If you really want to learn from us, I'll make you pay for it… by making every day worse until you leave. Kuno!"

Said Blue Thunder had sat silently during the proceedings, his sword laid out over his lap and crossed legs. Aside from the tissue paper stuffed up his bloody nose, he managed to strike a dignified pose. Dark eyes stared up as Kuno jammed his blade into the floor.

"You need not even ask. As a generous and kind soul, of course I shall help those in need. Leave Akane Tendo's training to me!" He then laughed manically, losing whatever credibility he may have once had. Amazingly, he seemed completely oblivious to the biting looks he was on the receiving end of.

"Kuno," Ryouga said again, with a familiarity that came from working, training, and giving orders to the slightly older fighter many times over the last month. "I want you to train with Ukyou."

"What?!" "Me, train with that Jackass?!"

…came the predictable replies.

"Really… you two have a good deal in common," the lost boy said, and hastily amended it with, "In terms of your fighting style. Ukyou, you don't fight like I do, and you don't fight like Ryu does. And unlike Mousse, your specialized style revolves around a singular weapon. You won't learn more from Kuno, but you'll develop more by learning with him, especially since you're both at around the same level of ability. If the both of you improve from this arrangement, then my squad is stronger for it, which is all I really care about."

Ukyou and Kuno stared daggers at each other, and both seemed about to object.

"If you want to leave, Ukyou, you're welcome to at any time," Ryouga added. "You aren't India Squad, after all. You're just a guest here."

And at that, he left the distinction between them unspoken, but obvious. Kuno would have to do what he was asked to, and it seemed like he realized that fact. A sour look crossed his face, but he sighed and accepted it. Ukyou, however, didn't have to listen. She could just walk away.

"Hey, Ryouga… since when did you start throwing around statements like that, huh?" Ukyou asked. "And when did you adopt this smarmy sensei attitude?"

Mousse chuckled at that, but she ignored him.

"Ever since I found my road to follow," he answered; another unusually cryptic response from a guy she had always thought as very straightforward. As Ukyou stared at him, she knew what it was. This was the old him, the one driven by anger and revenge, and unburdened by the complications of romantic interest. Somehow, he hadn't just gotten over his doomed love for Akane; he had banished it entirely from his mind. This was the him she could have met more than two years ago, before either found their way to Nerima.

When it came to Akane, to the girl he claimed to love, he had always been indecisive. He had called it his 'heart of glass' – so afraid was he of rejection, yet so afraid of being alone after having tasted the ambrosia of affection, that it had paralyzed their schemes to get their respective crushes. All the time Ukyou had known him, she had never bothered with the side of him that dealt with his dispute with Ranma, focusing instead on the him that could win over Akane for her. It seemed, now more than ever, that the fighter and the lover were two very different creatures within the lost boy.

Staring into the eyes of the fighter, she felt that part of herself rise up in challenge.

And, suddenly, she felt the impulse to fight him. Her hands grew sweaty as she clenched them, and that primal vicious hunger within her soul that was the nucleus of her fighting spirit began to resonate. It was something she hadn't felt since her duel with Hayato Myojin. Just being in the room with him, with the other boys of India Squad, Ukyou felt a surge of aggression and excitement that, in a different place and time, would have probably forced a blush to her cheeks.

"India Squad isn't Juliet Squad," he said, as if sensing her churning _ki_. No: he did see it. And he felt it; too, resonate more and more with his own. "Am I right?"

Ryu's own spiritual pressure was more restrained, but promised the same level of carnage. "Don't think you'll last long here if you aren't willing to fight with all you've got. When we hammer down a nail, it never sticks back up!"

"You took the words right out of my mouth," Mousse said, tucking his hands into his sleeves; a walking arsenal of weaponry.

"They are as unrefined as ronin can be," Kuno spoke up, resting his sword on his shoulder. "Nonetheless… this is a group worthy of having the Blue Thunder as a member."

"Alright, Hibiki." Ukyou reigned in her fighting instinct. She'd definitely take a crack at the lost boy, but not just yet. She'd wait till she had some surprises for him first. "I'll use you guys as my warm-up."

The guys all laughed at that, giving her cockiness a measure of approval.

"Well," Akane interrupted, shaking her head sadly but still cracking her knuckles. "The testosterone in here has to be thick enough to cut with a knife. But who should I work with, Ryouga-kun?"

"Mousse and Kuno's styles don't really suit you, and I don't have any boulders to pound you with, so…" Ryouga swept his hand towards the only guy left. "Until you've found your spiritual presence, I don't think Ryu will mind passing on one or two Yamasenken techniques."

"Reformed Yamasenken… actually," Ryu corrected, staring down the youngest Tendo daughter. "I'll see what I can do with her. It'll be good practice for when I found the new Kumon Dojo."

"That's a funny coincidence…" Akane wasn't fazed by the intimidating young man; she smirked right back at him. "I was about to say this'll be good practice for when I inherit the Tendo Dojo."

While the two girls got acquainted with their new training partners, Mousse walked over to where Ryouga stood, watching over the room. They were the core of India Squad, since they had known each other the longest, and worked together the most often. The two stood in silence for a few seconds, side by side.

"Ranma won't be too happy," Mousse said, speaking quietly. "About Akane getting involved, I mean."

"I didn't recommend her either, at first. But that was before…" Ryouga trailed off, and didn't finish his sentence. Mousse knew what he meant. He hadn't recommended Akane then because it was before he'd been cursed of his Jyusenkyou curse, and because he'd wanted to protect her. Now, looking at her, he saw another potential soldier. No: Ranma would not be happy with that.

"She was already walking down this road," he said, starting up a different sentence. "She had already made up her mind. If Ranma wants to stop her, let him suffer for it."

"And if she dies? That girl, who you loved so much it hurt, so much you would die for her…" Mousse asked, tentatively, "Could you order her to her death, Special Lieutenant Ryouga Hibiki?"

On the far side of the room from them, Akane poked Ryu boldly in the chest as she made some confident proclamation. The object of her attention laughed, and pointed to his arm. Most likely, they were talking about the _Kijin Raishu Dan_ – the signature vacuum blades of the Yamasenken style.

Ryouga sighed softly and closed his eyes.

"You know, Mousse, you'll never be very popular, asking those kinds of questions."

"Maybe. But someone has to."

…


	33. Room for Improvement III

* * *

"When someone is able to fight and willing to fight and accepted into this organization… that person becomes a soldier, and the act of tossing aside the title of civilian forfeits any claims for special treatment or protection from harm. Sometimes, that means they die."

* * *

Ranma's fingers paused over the keyboard. 

"Ten minutes, Ranma!" a voice called from his room.

"I know!" he called back. It wasn't like he couldn't hear that the movie hadn't started yet. What was it about girls that left them inclined to point out the obvious, anyway? It was definitely one of that uncute tomboy's less endearing traits.

And now she'd ruined his train of thought!

His mouse pointer hovered over his last sentence, and he reread it again. It was annoying enough having to write mission reports, but having to do written ones was even worse. He'd never been a great student, and his patience for expressing his opinions on paper was exceedingly limited. At least he wasn't being graded, at least as far as he knew. He just passed on the completed assignment to his mentor, and then defended his statements in their next face to face meeting. That part at least was kinda fun, but the initial research and composition was a total pain in the ass.

It didn't help that he was distracted by a half dozen other things.

Switching over to his email client, he saw one of them.

* * *

**From**: SLt. Hibiki Ryouga  
**Sent**: Wednesday, November 15, 2006, 15:32  
**To**: SLt. Saotome Ranma  
**Subject**: Ukyou and Akane 

I know this isn't what you wanted to hear, but you deserve to know.

Earlier today, both Ukyou and Akane came to me asking for help training. I tried to rebuff them, but they were persistent. It has come to my attention that Akane is trying to independently get certification to enlist in UNETCO. I don't know why. If she passes all the prerequisite levels of handling and certification, and the preliminary training (I do not doubt that she will), then all she will need is one written recommendation, and two unsolicited recommendations from among the base officers.

If you want to prevent her from joining UNETCO as an active duty soldier, you will have to personally convince her to stop. For what it is worth, I will not write her a written recommendation, but if I am approached for an unsolicited evaluation of her, I will answer all questions honestly and without bias.

See you at the PsiLab tomorrow and good luck with your written report.

-Ryouga

* * *

It happened to be the same problem waiting in his room and eating his popcorn. 

For some reason, despite all the worry and trouble she caused, he smiled at the thought of her. And that was the problem, really. He didn't know why he liked Akane, not really, but he knew he didn't want her put in harm's way. From the beginning, he and Ryouga had been in agreement about keeping her as far underground and as far from the aliens as possible. Hell, Ranma had wanted to keep all the girls out of danger, but then the lost boy had gone and written up his own evaluation of how useful they could be.

Now it seemed Ryouga couldn't be counted on at all to protect Akane from her own pigheadedness. Technically, Ranma knew that the lost boy had 'forgotten' his time with Akane as P-chan, and subsequently his infatuation with her, and that that was the likely reason for this change. Still, he was more than a little disappointed, both in his rival and friend and in Akane herself.

Really: what was she thinking!

Stupid, stupid, stupid macho chick!

Ranma had known about most of Akane's activities already thanks to Mr. Tendo, but by the way Ryouga had phrased it she was very close to being able to apply. He could try and cite her as being unfit to serve in a letter to the Commander, but without Ryouga to back him up, it would reek so much of bias that it wouldn't do any good at all. UNETCO had no problem with any female soldier who could fulfill the physical and psychological tests, so it wasn't even as if he could argue that she wasn't emotionally unprepared for fighting. Chances are that she was prepared, and that she would pass all the prelims.

It was true: the only option he had left was to talk to her and convince her not to try and sign up. The thought of that made him want to crawl out of his skin. Akane was as stubborn as a mule and twice as likely to kick someone who she found annoying. At least in his experience. Any normal girl would have been happy that he was protecting her, but not Akane, oh no of course not!

"There's no way I'm going to finish this now," he said with a defeatist groan, and minimized the visible programs after saving his document. He'd have to come back to it later before he went to sleep.

"There you are," Akane remarked as he entered the small bedroom he had in his quarters. She was fully clothed, of course, but her being there still caused his heart to miss a beat. Before coming here, all his physical experiences with her had either been violent, or slowly building towards romantic only to be interrupted by fiancés or parents or rivals or just random nonsense. Finally, after a year of tension, they had taken the chance to follow through, and the thought of it still filled his stomach with butterflies.

And just like that, he found himself in uncharted territory.

Nothing in his past experience had given him training on what to do after you started to act … more than friendly towards a girl. He'd never even worried about it before, what with all the craziness and the repeated female related poundings. He wasn't sure what was comfortable now, and what crossed the line. What was he supposed to do now with her? Marriage was what his pops and Mr. Tendo wanted, but that still seemed kind of far off in his mind.

'Man, watching casual relationships on TV was a lot easier than being in one!'

He fell back on his bed, and watched Akane carefully as he inched a little closer to her to keep from slipping off the side. Sure enough, she'd started chipping away at the popcorn he'd microwaved (no way he'd let Akane make it; she'd find **some** way to mess it up like burning it to a crisp), and as he innocently reached over for a handful, he wondered if she would give him the 'are you trying to touch me you pervert!' look. Maybe he'd just been looking for the worst, because she didn't even give it a second glance.

He suspected he could get away with more than usual with her, now, but how much… he still couldn't be sure. Still, uncute tomboy that she was, she didn't look bad there, her back against the wall by the head of his bed. Why did she have to make his life harder by getting involved in this mess? Why did she want to put her life on the line when he was already taking care of things? Giving up on finding rational answers for an irrational girl's conundrums, he took his spare pillow, folded it in over itself, and used it to prop up his head in the direction of the TV screen.

There were still a few minutes before the movie started.

"What were you working on back there?" Akane asked, as she put the popcorn down between them. "It's still strange seeing you working so hard on stuff like this."

"Feh!" he huffed. "I'll do work when there's a good reason to. And it's an ethics paper for my officer training."

Akane probed for a few more details. "You finished with it?"

"Just about," Ranma replied, not quite seeing why she'd care. Still, he did have something to bring up, to test the waters of so to speak, before the movie began.

"Hey," he asked, quickly. "I heard you and Ukyou dropped by on Ryouga and his group."

Akane wrapped her arms around her legs, and when she replied it was a little defensively. "Ukyou just wanted some help for her duel with Konatsu. I just stuck around for some pointers."

As always, a barb of a comment was the first thought that entered his mind, but he managed to control his foot-in-mouth disease and didn't blurt out anything he'd later regret. Akane could use the help, but reminding her of that fact was a rarely appreciated piece of insight. He'd had more than enough lumps on his head to prove that.

In the absence of a Ranma Remark (tm) Akane continued, "You know, she doesn't say it, but I think Ukyou's really worried about this fight. She wants to get better, you know?"

"It's only natural for a martial artist to want to be stronger," Ranma answered, the same mantra his father had instilled in him a decade or more ago.

"Not just that," Akane pressed. "She doesn't want you guys to think she isn't useful. She's fighting for her pride. She's trying hard to get better because she doesn't want you to think she's holding you back, or that you picking her was the wrong decision."

"Oh? Some people have complex motivations, don't they? I don't think any of the guys here are like that," Ranma observed, missing any sort of parallels or allegory that Akane may or may not have been trying to present. As if to show her displeasure with his powers of miss-observation, Akane sighed and gently tapped him on the head.

"Baka."

"Whatever…" he grunted. "This whole thing is just a lot of trouble, if you ask me."

"Do you think she has a chance, Ranma?" Akane asked, and he saw one of her legs slip under the covers to his right. "Ukyou I mean?"

"Of beating Konatsu? I wonder…" He crossed his arms as he thought. "No, probably not."

"Not even a small chance?" Akane seemed to really care about the topic, and he wasn't sure why. The two girls weren't good friends or anything, and they squabbled often enough, at least when they weren't working together against a common enemy.

"I know Konatsu's fighting potential better than anyone," Ranma explained, watching the TV screen and the parade of previews. "He isn't very strong, but he's fast, and pretty skilled. Kinda like Mousse. Plus, he'd got a buncha ninja tricks. When I fought him, I thought he was a girl, which meant I couldn't just hit him straight on."

Ranma remembered, then, when Akane (replete in her near invincible battle dougi, and beating him up with it while insulting him) had proclaimed, 'If you hit me even once, I'll never be able to forgive you!' It was a memory he hated to remember. If she had been fighting a real opponent, like Pantyhose Taro, she'd have been in for a real surprise. It was another reason why he didn't think Akane belonged on a battle field. She didn't want to fight… she wanted to win, and she would rely on an advantage that would inflate her abilities artificially. In a life or death fight, that kind of false sense of security would be suicidal.

He quickly put that memory aside.

"Now, if I'd known he was a guy, I'd have had less trouble. But he had a handicap then, too. Normally, as a ninja, he'd have a lot of equipment and weapons, but since he'd pawned those things for food to survive he had to rely on hand to hand… which isn't his specialty. This time, he'll be able to take whatever kinda stuff he wants to the fight."

"Really," he summarized, sounding somewhat weary of the while deal. "Konatsu's pretty dangerous if he goes all out. He'd give Mousse one hell of a fight. So… no… as Ucchan is now, she doesn't have a chance of beating him."

Akane made a sad little sigh at that bit of news, and he looked just over his shoulder at her. He was on the verge of asking why she was so interested when the movie finally started up, a booming sound introducing the assorted production companies involved in its making. Gradually, the two settled in to watch. Whatever problems that still had to be dealt with could be put off.

At least for a few hours.

* * *

Central Japan in mid November was not particularly warm, especially at night. It was a fact easily driven home when your best friend kept the car window down a crack to 'enjoy the fresh air.' As if they hadn't gotten enough of that during the last few hours outside. 

Hiroshi tried to shield his face as a particularly strong gust of wind blew in.

"Man, close the window already, would ya?"

"You're such a pussy, Hiro." The boy on the opposite side of the car, riding shotgun, went by the name Daisuke. They'd been best friends since elementary school, and they were both veterans of Furinkan. In the end, they'd even planned to attend the same college. That long friendship, however, did not keep Daisuke's quirks from getting any less annoying over the years.

A laugh from the back came from a new friend they'd made when visiting their new university. He went by the name of Ichiro. He was a year older, and coming out here into the countryside had been his idea. He and a bunch of guys from the dormitory had found a new disk golf course, and they'd decided to take the day off and give it a go before the weekend got started.

Hiroshi blinked a few times, clearing his vision. As the designated driver, he'd kept himself down to only two drinks, so he wasn't as giggly pasty as Daisuke got, but he was feeling a little tired. The road they were on was long and lonely, without another motorist in sight. Belatedly, he wished he'd chosen rock instead of paper, and then one of the other guys could have ended up handling the drive home.

"Turn up the music. Let's hear some tuuunnnneeess…."

"I could go for some better music myself," Hiroshi agreed with the somewhat slurred collegiate in the back. "There isn't shit on the radio."

"Dai! Check the CDs in the glove compartment," Ichiro's said as he leaned forward enough to stick his head between the front two seats. Hiroshi rolled his eyes. Great. The idiot didn't have his belt on or anything.

"Right. Let me see here…" Daisuke started to rummage around in said compartment, pushing aside handfuls of crumpled paper marked by MapQuest and Yahoo to find a black CD case. Hiroshi kept his eyes on the road. Just his luck, some animal would jump out and crash into them. As his friend flipped through the plastic pages, Hiroshi's eyes strayed to the long row of trees that flanked the road on both sides. It had gotten strangely dark all of a sudden, and he found that had to rely on the little yellow glowy things in the middle of the road.

"Why is there so much J-Pop on here? Is this the Love Hina soundtrack?"

"Just pick something!" Ichiro finally leaned back. "We're gonna lose this station in a minute anyway."

Sure enough, the station was starting to lose reception. Without moving his hands from the wheel, Hiroshi used his thumb to try and change it. Ichiro had a nice car, that was for sure, and the ability to switch around the preset radio stations and even toggle the Nav System from the wheel itself was pretty cool. The next station, too, was garbled.

"Here we go! Some classic early 90s!" Daisuke slipped a CD into the slot just under the manual radio controls, and a second later music started to play. They got about halfway into the first song, when the CD started to skip.

"Did you scratch the disk, Dai?"

"No way, man! Maybe you CD burner nicked it?"

Staring up at the moon, high in the night sky, an inexplicable chill ran down Hiroshi's spine. He pressed down harder on the gas, picking up speed. He was already more than thirty kilometers over the speed limit before he realized what he was doing, and a second later, he realized that he didn't care. There weren't any cops around, and something in the recesses of his soul was crying out to go faster.

"Hey, man, ease up…" Daisuke started to say, and the car did begin to go more slowly. "Hiroshi? Yo, Hiro?"

"What's going on?" Ichiro asked, poking his head forward again. "What's the problem?"

"Something's wrong with the gas," Hiroshi replied, after tapping the pedal a few times to make sure. "It just… it just stopped."

As the car drifted, bit by bit, towards an eventual stop, the CD player skipped one last time, and faded out as it lost power. A few seconds later, the car battery must have died, because the lights went out and the digital clock stopped and then disappeared entirely. Plunged into darkness, the three boys cursed and fumbled around for the emergency flashlights.

Daisuke was remarkably prepared, having a little pen sized light on his keychain. Twisting it on, it provided a meager bit of illumination that the three clung to like moths. With it, it wasn't hard to retrieve the second larger flashlight in the back, behind the driver's seat. Ichiro took that one, and he quickly opened the back door and left the car.

"Hey, wait!" Daisuke followed, and Hiroshi cursed loudly as he lost sight of much of anything. The dashboard was lifeless, but he could still see at least outlines and some details, thanks to the star strewn sky. Unlike in the city, there was no light pollution out here, plus the sky was cloud free; you could easily pick out the dimples on the moon.

Beams of light flashed by, as Ichiro and Daisuke went around to check on the car's engine. Hiroshi popped the hood, and waited. He didn't know about their older friend, but Daisuke didn't know jack about how to fix a car, or replace a battery, or whatever. Reaching into his pants pocket, he pulled out his trusty cell phone, surprised neither of the other two guys had thought to check theirs. He could just call…

No one, it seemed, because the battery was dead.

"Fuck!" Ichiro cursed from outside. "Damn cell's dead!"

"Same here!" Daisuke finally got to checking his. The hood of the car lifted up, and the lights mostly disappeared. Not liking just sitting there, Hiroshi also left the car to see what was going on with the engine. Sure enough, neither Ichiro nor Daisuke knew what to do, and they spent a few minutes alternating between offering guesses as to what had happened, to just looking around inside the guts of the crippled vehicle. Hiroshi, however, spent his time watching the woods.

Around then, Ichiro's flashlight started to fade.

"Oh fuck… oh fuck…!" Ichiro's mouth ran, as he shook the light waving what was left of it across the infinite expanse of the night sky. "What the fuck are we…"

As Ichiro's light faded, and Daisuke's stated to suffer the same fate, a reciprocal light began to grow in the distance, behind the trees. It started as little more than a twinkle, or a will o' the wisp, that barely caught Hiroshi's eyes. A cold terror began to rise in his throat, stealing his breath, as the light grew brighter… and closer.

"Guys!" Hiroshi gasped. "Guys! GUYS! Look!"

Ichiro and Daisuke turned, slowly, from the car to the illumination coming from the forest. Dai started to say 'helicopter' but the word scarcely left his mouth, as the light rose up above the tree line. It was bright, but more like the moon than like the sun, and it seemed round and seamless as it slowly rose up into the air. In that instant, the forest was as quiet as a tomb.

Soundlessly, save for the near heart attack it caused, it projected a line of light down into the forest. Hiroshi felt the impulse to run, and he started to move his feet, when the light swung around - so fast, too fast! - and enveloped him and the two others. His legs seized up and froze, like a deer caught in the headlights of a car.

He heard a voice, then, and felt a hand close around his heart.

And then, suddenly, the entire sky filled with light and the headlights wavered and dimmed. Blinking hard, Hiroshi saw the bright light in the sky, but where it had once been a perfect and homogeneous glowing orb, half of it was orange and sore like a molten ingot of steel. There was no preamble before another flash filled the world, and Hiroshi nearly lost his footing as a blast of heat made him wince.

The headlights were gone, then, and he watched mouth agape as something saucer shaped wobbled in midair, billowing vapor and trying desperately to maintain position. He glanced over to Daisuke and Ichiro, to make sure they were still there, still seeing this… this event. Then he went back to staring at the formerly flying saucer, now more like a broken and blasted Frisbee. With a whine, it tilted and fell from the sky.

When it crashed, Hiroshi could just feel the vibration beneath his feet.

"Holy… SHIT!"

Another whine came in over their heads, much closer, as another flying saucer passed overhead. This one, however, seemed different. It didn't bother hanging ominously, instead preferring to lower in a decidedly hasty fashion. Four landing struts folded out, and in only a few seconds it was on the ground. There was a light underneath it, and tall black shapes appeared, one by one.

What ultimately came into sight sure as hell wasn't the lanky Hollywood caricature of an alien. He was, after all, a healthy Japanese male of college age. As they got closer, and the movements and mannerisms became more obvious, he knew what he was seeing.

"Spartans!"

"Replica soldiers!"

"Space Marines!"

The three gave each other a look like 'what?' and then turned their attention back to the obviously (probably) humans heading in their direction. There were four heading out in the direction the other flying saucer had crashed, and they were wearing bulky suits, larger than the sort the Master Chief Spartan-117 sported in the HALO games. They were all colored black, too, which made it hard to really judge details.

Two of the more lightly armored people headed in their direction, moving at a quick jog. Unlike the first four, these looked a bit more like the Master Chief, at least in the fact that their body suit – or armor – seemed mostly form fitting. When they got close, the voice of one of them suddenly became audible in mid sentence.

"… on our way!"

"Geez, securing civilians?" The other one, a woman by her voice, slowed her pace as she got within a couple meters of the three college boys. And what was that on her back? "Why does Echo Squad get all the fun?"

"Look up 'chain of command' when you get the chance. Well, I'll be, look at this…" The taller one, the male, propped his rifle up against his shoulder and held out his other hand as he approached. "Sorry guys, but I'm gonna have to ask you follow me."

Hiroshi, still more than a little overwhelmed by what had just happened over the last few minutes, was about to comply when Daisuke gasped and snapped his fingers. The normally inconspicuous dark haired young man pointed right at the tall armored soldier.

"Ranma! I'd recognize that voice anywhere!" Daisuke proclaimed, and then pointed less assuredly at the other one. "And you've just gotta be Ukyou. That giant spatula is a dead giveaway!"

The two black armored soldiers faced each other briefly then returned to the three civilians.

"Life is full of crazy coincidences. This way!" Ranma pointed back to the landed saucer with his thumb. In the distance, something exploded, and the sound of… some kind of weapons fire could be heard.

"I mean NOW! Move Move Move!" He and the other trooper, probably Ukyou though she hadn't spoken again since that one time, roughly herded the three guys away from the road, keeping their heads low. As they got close to the ship, Hiroshi took the opportunity to stare in gaping awe at the freaking coolness that suddenly surrounded him. With the three of them sheltered next to the saucer, the two soldiers suddenly stood ramrod straight.

"Shit!" Ranma snarled. "Runners! Ukyou…"

"Leave it to me!" The female soldier replied, and took off in a burst of speed back for the road. Reaching it faster than almost any normal human sprinter, she took cover behind the crippled car Hiroshi had driven into this mess with. With a straight arm, Ranma pushed them back further, next to some sort of treaded robot tank that was half in and half out of the bushes.

It all seemed to be happening so quickly, Hiroshi couldn't follow what was going on, and felt a strange sense of distorted time. The sound of gun fire came from somewhere behind them, maybe a mile or so away, along with a different sort of sound. Then came the unmistakable sound of a tree falling in the woods (at least when someone was around to hear it).

Maybe one tense minute later, Ukyou jumped up from behind the car, and fired at something. An inhuman wail, like a flayed cat, filled the air. She quickly ducked back under cover, and rolled away, as some sort of green thing streaked through the air, leaving a faint afterglow in the atmosphere. One shot hit the ground, and blasted a crater into the asphalt. Another just barely avoided hitting the car, and instead went over it to completely incinerate the trunk of a tree.

Switching neatly from her rifle to her giant battle spatula, Ukyou spun as she rose from a crouch. Something seemed to hit the trees off the side of the road with a rustle, and a second later a small grey form came flying through the air, arms flailing. Ukyou pushed both her arms forward, weapon in hand, to meet the oncoming target. Passing by her silhouette the flying body cleaved neatly in two before hitting the ground behind her.

Shaking the gore from her weapon, she walked just out of sight.

A second later, another gunshot rang out.

"Confirmed," Ranma said, speaking into some sort of helmet microphone. "Area is clear. Will remain on site until further orders."

"This is so awesome!" Daisuke crooned. "Sooo awesome!"

"Thank the gods my car wasn't hit…" Ichiro cried, tears streaking his cheeks.

"Ranma," Hiroshi started to ask, though he didn't know quite where to begin. 'How's it been, what're you up to?' seemed a little insufficient at the moment.

"I'm really sorry, guys," Ranma interrupted, picking something out from a pocket on his uniform, or armor, or whatever it was. "We should be in the clear now, so… well, I'll see ya when I see ya."

Hiroshi was about to ask what he meant by that, when the armored form of the boy he had known back in Furinkan High School lifted up and aimed a small aerosol spray. Two little squirts and everything went black.

When he awoke, hours later, he would drive back to the dorm with the other guys and remark how lucky they were that they hadn't gotten into an accident when he fell asleep at the wheel. He would swear off drinking, even a little, when he had to drive, and Hiroshi would go on with his life without looking up at the stars and wondering how close he had come to the unspeakable.

Ranma went back, filed his report, got some sleep, and trained for the next time. This mission in particular would stick out, though, not just because they'd been able to arrive and strike before anyone had gotten hurt, but because they had saved people he knew. It was just a shame that it had to remain a secret. Still, he figured his old classmates would learn the truth soon enough…

It would make a great story for their five year high school reunion!

-----

That following morning, only a few miles from where Hiroshi and his friends had been saved, the remains of a small campfire smoldered. Two people stood nearby, one on a cell phone, and the other finishing cleaning up the area. Similarly, two large backpacks rested against the thick trunk of a tree.

"Yes. Very well. I'll take care of it…"

The taller one of the two, a trim man wearing a long navy blue traveling coat, closed his phone and slipped it into his inner breast pocket. As he pivoted, to look over to his side, he adjusted his clothes – a plain western style shirt with an unbuttoned collar. Black hair hung over his face, the same color as the short beard that framed his jaw, partly obscuring his green eyes.

"Was that your friend, dear?"

The woman was more petite, over a foot shorter than her six foot two inch tall husband. Her similarly black hair was folded back on itself to keep it from dangling past her shoulders. She wore a long khaki colored drill jacket that reached down to just below her knees, and up to her wrists. Beneath that, she wore a white _hadajuban_ undershirt, and over it a black sash around her waist. Unlike with the man's boots, she sported a black _jika-tabi_ over her feet and lower legs, as well as _waraji_ for footwear.

Her brown eyes strayed to the two massive backpacks nearby, and with one arm and no visible effort, she picked one up and tossed it in the man's direction. He picked it out from midair with one hand, and lazily slid it down his arm and over his shoulder. A second later, she picked the other bag up and did the same.

"We missed the party," Tetsuya Hibiki said, and grinned without a hint of aggravation, showing off two overdeveloped canine teeth. "Oh well! Maybe next time, right?"

"If there is a next time, please tell your friend to give us a little more advance warning," Mitsuko replied, obviously a little miffed that they'd gone all this way for nothing. Still, as a Hibiki, she was used to it. "Where should we head now? Kyoto? Fukuchiyama?"

" Osaka," her husband answered, and started to walk. "This way."

Mitsuko would have been more than a little shocked had she realized her husband, the direct inheritor of the Hibiki directional curse, was actually heading in a direct straight line for Osaka. Later, she would chalk it up to good luck, and a fortunate twist of fate, that they got where they were headed in record time.

But it was neither luck nor fortunate fate that was responsible.


	34. Not Yet or Kuonji Counterattack! I

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. The duel between Ukyou and Konatsu is at hand, and with something to prove, both are prepared to unleash their full potential in the pursuit of victory. Meanwhile, in Osaka, Ukyou's father faces a life or death struggle of his own.

* * *

**The Road To Cydonia**  
Chapter XII  
_Not Yet (or Kuonji Counterattack!)_

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

Konatsu chewed on the body of his mechanical pencil as he read over the last question on the written exam. He could feel the answer just under the surface, or perhaps in the periphery of his mind, and once he found it, the response was so obvious he couldn't believe he'd hesitated at all. Writing the answer in English instead of Japanese was still a little surreal, but after a month of doing it, almost instinctive. Truly, the Pedagogical Psionic Interface (or 'Reading Rainbow as some called it) was an amazing thing. 

Despite doing some recommended early reading and research, before this morning he had only had the most basic knowledge of the more advanced weapons in the UNETCO arsenal. Now, he felt confident that he could field strip and clean a T-7A2 Advanced Laser Rifle, and he even understood (abstractly) the workings behind the alien derived family of plasma weapons. Not the math or anything, but some of the relevant physics, and the purpose behind the key components.

Understanding all that had also given him a deep appreciation for how lucky Kuno had been, during Operation Zebra, to have been wearing personal armor. Back when UNETCO had been first formed, soldiers had been thrown into battle with the best modern Kevlar and ceramic armor, which had offered little or no protection beyond some small psychological benefit. As a trained _shinobi_, and a martial artist, Konatsu had a healthy respect (or even antagonism) towards normal guns, but the more advanced weaponry he had learned about was frightening.

The laser weapons used by UNETCO weren't only essentially instantaneous between trigger pull and target interception, but they could do terrible things to a body. Before the Pedagogical instruction, they had all watched a video of plasma and laser weapons in advance, part of the "Don't Get Hurt" series. He'd seen a laser cut a hole right through an alien, seen another shoot off an arm, and another cut an alien lengthways in half (while their instructor had pointed out blithely how easy it was to adjust the dwell point of the beam to creating cutting motions).

The plasma weapons had been even worse!

Unlike with the laser weapons, the plasmas used clips with a set number of shots. Each one contained a small amount of Elerium-115, a highly exotic isotope that, under certain conditions, released energy and anti-matter. Inside a plasma weapon, the energy released by the Elerium annihilation was then used to superheat a thin helix-like column of plasma, via a process called Ionic Cyclotron Resonance. Packaged inside the innermost concentric magnetic bubble, an aggregate of anti-protons with only one tenth the combined mass of the smallest grain of sand formed the second hammer blow of the resulting shot when it ultimately hit its target at around eleven kilometers per second.

The results of this were dramatic. He'd been shown similar film the first day he'd signed on, and more was forthcoming (though this time most dealt with misfires rather than deliberate targeting). A human target hit in the torso would literally explode as if he had swallowed a bomb, flash vaporizing into a smattering of glassy carbonized bone fragments. Half the time a hit to the arm or leg, fortunately, tended to only disintegrate that limb due to over penetration on the part of the plasma component, preventing the instant death of the previously attached body.

Taking cover was the only safe thing to do. A good solid tree or a large rock would shatter explosively, but that was often survivable (and, in personal or powered armor, the effect was completely harmless). A wall would generally be shot straight through, unless it was reinforced concrete. Personal Armor itself could, as Kuno had proven, stand up to the power of a plasma rifle or pistol, though generally not a heavy plasma. Powered Armor stood a much better chance, but even then there were no guarantees.

Yes, Kuno had been quite lucky to escape with no major injuries.

Sighing, Konatsu shook his head and turned back to his test. He was almost done. Already, the two girls had finished, and so had Ranma, Ryouga and Mousse. Ukyou and Shampoo had left, and so had the Chinese fighter, but the two team leaders waited patiently at the front of the room. Both teams would get together again later today for joint psionic training and exercises, but they generally hung out separately, so Konatsu assumed that both leaders were waiting for the last of their respective team members to finish.

He turned to the next question:

"In the field, you notice that your plasma rifle produces a short high-pitched whine when fired. What is the problem with it, if any? Justify your answer."

That was an easy one - Konatsu didn't have much experience with tests or schools, but he still didn't think that most high school teachers devised as many trick type questions as whomever had written this exam did. Maybe a third of them had been like this one. There was nothing wrong with the rifle, since the plasma stream made that sound due to charged particles pushing aside air molecules.

Finishing the last question a few minutes later, he went back to check over the exam from the beginning. It was all pretty easy, and mostly just a test of one's comprehension of the information jammed psionically into one's brain. A few days of practice and a certification test after that, and he'd be ready to go into the field with an advanced rifle. Until they had that level of ability, Command would never let them participate in missions against the more dangerous alien species.

Deciding he was as good as done, he walked up to the front of the room and slid his exam into the brown folder that sat alone on a glass desk. There, it would wait with its peers for proper evaluation. He saw Ranma nod approvingly at him, and he smiled shyly. He was almost to the door when he heard someone stand up. He'd been expecting Ranma, but to his surprise, it was the leader of India Squad.

"Could I talk to you for a minute, Konatsu?" Ryouga asked, politely.

"Of course, Hibiki-taichou!" he replied, bowing his head slightly. The lost one seemed a little bemused by the response. Konatsu could guess it was more respectful than what he was used to from the members of his squad. Tacking on the_ taichou_ suffix to indicate his superior rank was likely something the others probably wouldn't tend to do.

Ryouga opened the door to the room directly adjacent to the one the exam had been held in. Shirokuro, his ever present companion whenever he went in the base complex, looked up to make sure he didn't somehow get lost, and then lowered her head to rest on her paws when it became obvious that he would be fine. Like the last room, this one was also designed for small conferences or lectures; a dozen chairs sat around a table, a pull down projection screen hung from the far wall, and a whiteboard adorned another.

"Excuse me for asking so abruptly, but…" the _shinobi_ smoothed the creases on his pants legs and sat in a demure fashion. "Is this about Miss Ukyou?"

Ryouga settled for simply leaning against the wall.

"Is it that obvious?" he asked, and to his credit, he actually sounded somewhat guilty.

"It's quite alright that this isn't about me, Hibiki-taichou." Konatsu offered a wan smile. "I'm happy just doing my job without drawing too much negative attention."

From the look on the other man's face, Konatsu could see he understood somewhat. Being a center of attention wasn't always a good thing, and for someone with a naturally timid personality, it wasn't desirable at all.

"It isn't that…" Ryouga persisted, a little despite himself. "I've never heard a bad word spoken about you by anyone, you know. You're a valuable member of what we're trying to build here. You should be proud, Konatsu."

"I am proud," the male _kunoichi_ insisted. "Very proud! Hibiki-taichou, as far back as I can remember people have used me - used my abilities and my so called talents - for their own benefit. My step-sisters and step-mother were not particularly… effective kunoichi, so they used me. Occasionally, our clients made use of my abilities as well, though my true gender put some of them off. I was unhappy, but I understood it was my fate. Even after Miss Ukyou gave me the courage to leave, she… took some advantage of me. I didn't really mind."

"But here," Konatsu spoke with genuine happiness. "Here, I am doing something that is just… and right. I'm making a difference, and I'm part of something gratifying. For the first time in my life, I think I'm doing something my parents would have been proud of. That makes me proud, too, and I don't mind if I don't have the spotlight. I wouldn't even know what to do if I were thrust into it."

For a few seconds after Konatsu finished, Ryouga stood still, leaning casually against the wall. Slowly, he smiled.

"I'm glad to hear that. After all, what is a man without a cause; without a reason to live? Just an animal, wandering from place to place; empty inside. You should know, Konatsu… I'd have been honored to have you in my squad," the Special Lieutenant said, and feeling better about it, prepared to broach the subject at hand.

"Thank you, sir!"

"Now…" Ryouga let out a deep huff of air. "Ukyou."

Konatsu delicately cupped his hands together. "What about her?"

He came out and asked, "What is your motivation behind this duel, Konatsu?"

The effeminate ninja sighed softly, and stared at his hands. "I want her to see me. To see the real me. That's all."

"She," Konatsu stammered a bit, "She's a very special girl to me."

"Do you love her?" Ryouga asked, not beating around the bush.

He nodded slowly. "I think I do."

"But you must know…" The so called lost boy craned his neck, searching the other man's posture and body language. "She may die out there. You can't protect her. Can you put that aside for the good of the mission?"

Konatsu looked up at him then, stared him straight in the eyes. "Miss Ukyou knew the risks when she agreed to sign up. She's a martial artist. That lifestyle alone puts you at risk. But… but when we have our duel, I'll see how strong she is. I'll feel it, and it'll be all the proof I need to know she can fight her own battles."

"In that case…" Ryouga said, pushing himself off the wall. "I'll just say this: good luck."

Konatsu blinked at this. "But… you're training her, aren't you? Or helping her train?"

"And that's why I told you 'good luck.'" Ryouga smiled, showing off his oversized canines in a rare display of mixed confidence and mirth. He reached for the door handle, turning his back on the ninja.

"For what its worth," he added, tone more somber. "I hope the both of you find what you're looking for in this. Ukyou will be a happier person if she stops gasping at straws, and takes a breath of fresh air."

Konatsu couldn't find any fault in that statement, but there was something in Ryouga's tone of voice that brought back old unanswered questions. Now, while they were on this topic and having just bared his feelings on the matter, he felt comfortable enough to broach it.

"Hibiki-taichou," he spoke up, just as Ryouga stared to open the door. "Can… can I ask you something?"

The Special Lieutenant paused, and pivoted until he could face Konatsu without looking directly over his shoulder. "I don't see why not."

"If you don't mind me asking…" The genius ninja stood, again straightening his pants and holding them in place with his hands, as if he were wearing a kimono or dress. "You knew Miss Ukyou before I did. From what I've heard, you two worked together a few times before. Then, you just stopped. What happened? Did the two of you ever… have anything?"

"Me… and her?" Ryouga scoffed dismissively, but slowly came around to elaborating. "Ukyou seemed nice enough at first, and yes, we did work together a few times to break up Ranma and Akane, and… do a few other things. We even spent a vacation together in Hokkaido, after I got the wrong hot springs tickets during that stupid contest…"

He shook his head. "She was kind of violent and tomboyish, hitting me for making mistakes or getting lost. But it was even kind of fun, too, and I didn't always mind having someone along to talk to, or just walk with. Most of the time I was just a sounding board for her schemes."

That evoked a small, wistful laugh.

"But then…" he hesitated, and looked away from Konatsu, boring a hole in the door with his eyes. "I happened to drop in on another one of her brilliant plans, involving a place called the Cursed Tunnel of Lost Love. It seemed like a good idea, and I was never that good at turning down any chance to win over Akane back then. Ukyou told me I was supposed to stick with her, and let Ranma and Akane go off together, but about halfway through, those two had one of their fights, and Akane ran after me, asking if I'd escort her out."

"Without thinking it through – hell, just having her want to be with me for once fried my brain – I agreed, planning to drag the whole thing out as long as possible. But… things fell through, and eventually Ranma and Akane ended up back together. Ukyou was pissed that I'd almost screwed everything up, that… that I'd turned on her, but we made up, and just as Akane and Ranma got to the exit, where we'd heard no couple could survive unscathed…"

He groaned in a disgusted fashion. "The spirits of the broken couples completely ignored Ranma and Akane, and pounced on us instead! They wouldn't listen to reason, and we ended up fighting them. This was just a few months after I'd almost died on Mt. Horai, during the fight with Herb and the Musk, and when the spirits started to drag Ukyou away… I got a little hasty, and used my Bakusai Tenketsu to bring the whole exit crashing down. By the time we got out, it was too late."

"I blamed her for taking my hands and making us look like a couple, and she blamed me for acting like a 'typical macho jackass boyfriend' and for trying to hug her, which I didn't. After that… we barely talked. She didn't want anything to do with me."

"And you?" Konatsu prompted. "What did you think of her?"

"I thought…" Ryouga's fist tightened around the doorknob. "I thought she was a friend. It doesn't matter anymore. Is that all you wanted to ask?"

"Yes," Konatsu said, and bowed his head. "Thank you."

"Later," the lost one offered, and quickly left. Watching him walk down the hall, lead by Shirokuro, Konatsu wondered how honest about that last part the other man had been. If fact, it had sounded like he and Ukyou had been quite close, or at least closer than Konatsu had ever really been with the girl he loved. As it was, he felt a little jealous, not so much because he worried that Ryouga might try and reacquaint himself with Ukyou, but because said lost boy seemed to have had fun times with her on strange schemes and adventures.

All he had ever gotten to do was wait tables.

* * *

"Damnit! This one would have worked if you hadn't screwed up, you jackass!" 

"Hey! Don't try and pin this on me! I was just trying to help!"

"I don't want to hear it! Not from you! Why'd you have to go and do that? Be like that!"

"If it wasn't for me, you'd…"

"No. Just… just stop it, Ryouga. Just… just leave me alone. Just go away."

"Ukyou…"

"Didn't you hear me! Get lost!"

Of all the phrases she'd had to use…

'Didn't you hear me! Get lost!'

* * *

'Didn't you hear me! Get lost!' 

Ukyou fell to the ground, writhing and clutching her left arm. She didn't scream, instead hissing in great gulps of air through clenched teeth and periodically slamming her fist into the floor. In front of her, her giant battle spatula stood upright, the wide half of the weapon wedged into a _tatami_ mat. The front face of it was still smoking, and most of the area around it was torn up, save for the part immediately behind it.

Ryu whistled. "That was a BIG one."

Ryouga lowered his hands, the fingertips still leaking green and black emotive _ki_ from beneath the bandages and fighting tape. Bits and pieces of burned cloth fell from his hands. That last _shishi hokoudan_ had been more powerful than expected. He quietly cursed Konatsu for reminding him of that old argument. He'd all but forgotten about it until now.

Or had he?

"I guess she's done for today…" he started to say.

"_Mada mada_," Ukyou slurred in Japanese, the equivalent of 'not yet.' Slowly getting up to her knees, she clung protectively to her left arm. She was bleeding, from just below the shoulder and around the elbow. Those were just scratches, however. The last _ki _blast had flayed away a few lines of uppermost epidermis, revealing pink new skin, not yet ready to fact the outside world. She wasn't as tough as most of the guys, and she didn't handle shearing or concussive forces as well.

Looking at her, Konatsu's words came back to him, and he wondered.

Ukyou could be quite personable and friendly; it was really only when she schemed to break Akane and Ranma up that she lost her cool and her confidence wavered. It was those times when an uglier side of her came to the surface: self-conscious, overly defensive, snappy and short tempered, and easily falling into a pit of jealousy. And when her plan went awry, as it always inevitably did, the first thing she did was look for someone to blame.

He could take being ordered around, and even having people expect results from him, but fear of failure and rejection when dealing with girls had always made him nervous. Having Ukyou snarl at him after the fact just made things worse. This was much better, far superior in his eyes: this fighter named Ukyou, bloody but unbowed.

'I never want to see you in another light,' he thought, just then.

"_Mada mada_?" he mimicked her tone, and motioned to Ryu with his head. The other fighter hesitated for a second, and then raised his arms. Slashing them apart, he announced his signature technique.

"Kijin Raishu Dan!"

Ukyou quickly rolled and got behind her megaspatula, using the broad body of the weapon to block the three vacuum blades. She did a good job using it to shield her small frame, but far from perfect. Ryouga wasn't quite satisfied. As Ukyou herself had said: _mada mada_.

Not yet.

Another two vacuum blades splashed against the nearly indestructible surface of Ukyou's new mega spatula, Hera-sama (or Spatula-sama for the 'Engrish' speakers). After a few seconds, it became obvious that Ukyou was catching her breath, and that she had no intention of leaving what cover she had. Ryouga crossed his arms and smirked.

"Flush her out," he said, speaking to Ryu. "Make her run."

"I've got just the thing!" The _Yamasenken _Master took a step forward, and altered his stance, pivoting slightly and moving one arm forward and the other out to the side at a perpendicular angle. "Kumon Reformed Style Yamasenken: Kijin Raishu Tekidan!"

Ukyou, this time, had the good sense to move. With a yelp, she jumped to her feet as the vacuum blade curved around at a severe angle, like a boomerang, to strike from around her static defensive position. Ryouga watched; not only evaluating Ukyou's ability to move while injured and carrying her weapon, which still had the practice weights attached, but also Ryu's new technique. The _Kijin Raishu Tekidan_, or Demon God Assault Grenade, was designed to defeat enemies hiding behind defilade, or under cover. It could curve into a trench, around a tree, arc through a doorway…

It was promising.

Ukyou, however, didn't seem to be enjoying it. Back flipping, the girl used her weapon to parry a regular vacuum blade, and then just barely brought the heavy megaspatula around to guard her back. A half second later, a curving Demon God Assault Grenade hit the area that would have otherwise been her unprotected right shoulder blade. Ryu persisted, and Ukyou continued to dodge. It was good, but it wasn't exactly what Ryouga was looking for.

Some more incentive was in order.

Curling his fingers, a green and black orb of light appeared in the palm of his hand. It twisted wildly, as _ki _flowed like water out of his mauled fingers. Never before had he been able to pump this much raw spiritual and mental energy into his attacks. Only the perfect _shishi hokoudan_ could compare, and then only because that technique released emotive _ki_ from the entire body all at once.

In the middle of his hand, the ball of _ki_ grew larger and smaller, condensing and expanding as he poured more into it. Most of the time, it was more a Lion Roar Shotgun than a proper Bullet, with the _ki_ widening dramatically once it left the hands. Now, he could weave it all together much more tightly. When Captain Nivelles had asked him to hit a target at 100 meters with his _shishi hokoudan_, he'd barely been able to, and even then he'd only nicked it. Now, he was sure he could at least give it a good hard shake.

Straightening out his arm, he opened his hand, and let the ball of_ ki_ free.

It screamed like a banshee, and in the half second it took to reach her, Ukyou's eyes widened in panic and she brought her battle spatula up in front of her. Then, she disappeared in the torrent of green and black that washed over her like a tide. Again, Ryouga found his fingers leaking excess _ki_, like a broken tap leaked water. A bit of concentration, however, and it ebbed down and stopped like normal.

There was still no sign of Ukyou, at least until he took a few steps to the side and saw her on the floor. She wasn't moving. For a brief second, something inside him clenched tight and he didn't breathe. Then, just as he was about to call for a medic, he saw her chest rise. With Ryu just behind him, Ryouga walked up to her with a slightly hurried pace.

Kneeling, he took her pulse, and confirmed that it was fine. Or as fine as you'd expect. As if stirred by someone's touch, she coughed, blood covering her red lips and making a few crimson spots on the floor. Her eyes opened, and he reached down to force her to look at him. Her eyes weren't dilated, and it didn't look like she had a concussion, so she was probably just a bit stunned.

He sighed, and stood up.

Ukyou Kuonji had seen better days. The ribbon she wore had been blown off, leaving her hair disheveled and falling in every wild direction. She'd taken a vacuum blade to her left temple at a steep angle, preventing a cut but causing a lot of swelling. Just like the last time, her left arm had been caught by his _shishi hokoudan_. Having suffered from similar wounds before, he knew how _ki _blasts hurt like a thousand needles, activating undue numbers of afferent nerves. She'd managed to keep from getting hit much around her torso, but her right leg had three cuts, two on the calf and one on the outer thigh.

"Uuuuggghhh…" she moaned, wincing as her eyes filled with tears from the pain in her left arm. "Oh, gods…!"

He stood there, waiting.

Rolling onto her right side, she slammed her fist into the ground a few times. He had to resist the urge to cheer her on, to shout encouragement. There wouldn't be that on the battlefield. In a real battle, there wouldn't be anyone wanting you to win; there wouldn't be any fans cheering you on. There would only be a malevolence that wished you were beaten, or worse. You had to get back up in spite of that, despite the fact that you were alone.

"Stand by yourself!" he thought. "For yourself! Ukyou…!"

"Damnit! Damnit!" she let out a few labored breaths as she started to tuck in her legs. In the process, she scraped her right leg, and one of the cuts there. "Ah! FUCK! Son of a bitch!"

He smiled; that had always been one of the more amusing things about her. Growing up in a boy's school, renouncing her femininity after Ranma and Genma left her behind, Ukyou had developed a taste for colorful vocabulary. Akane grumbled a lot, and she had no problems with 'idiot' or even 'dumbass' but that was as much as one could expect from her. Shampoo cursed in Chinese, and often quite foully, but that was usually sexist claptrap. When she was pissed off enough, Ukyou could trade words with a wounded sailor.

And, soon enough, she was on one knee, and then on her feet.

He watched her for a second as she caught her breath, and then, without the slightest warning, his hand lashed out like a striking serpent. It met part of the handle of her battle spatula with a clang, catching him just above the wrist. Not bad. Not bad at all.

"Good speed," he complimented, and pushed a bit harder with that arm. Ukyou's legs held as she was pushed back, and so did her hold on her weapon. "Now, how about you get that arm looked at?"

Ukyou managed a small grin. They were past the point where she had to say something cocky to impress them or save face. Taking stock of herself, her condition, and how long they'd been at it, she let out a deep breath and nodded. He stepped back and dropped his arm. A part of him wanted to help her stand, and he could see Ryu felt the same way. But he held out his hand and stopped the _Yamasenken_ Master.

Ukyou propped herself up with her megaspatula, and stood by herself, fighting off fatigue and exhaustion.

"This isn't dodging practice," Ryouga critiqued, looking at her seemingly without remorse. "If you get into that kind of habit, Konatsu will beat you, and the enemy will kill you. You aren't Ranma. You don't have the endurance to dodge all day."

He tapped her weapon with the knuckle of his right index finger.

"This is your shield. This will block anything."

"Tell that to my left arm," Ukyou growled, lifting up the pained appendage.

"When you use your weapon," Ryouga replied. "You have to believe in it. When I used my ki attack before, you thought to yourself 'I think I'm safe,' and 'I think I'll be able to block this.' So part of you got hit. Next time, 'believe that you will be safe.' 'Believe that you will block.' Thinking, but not believing, halves your effectiveness."

"It… it isn't easy to believe that, when there's this… this wave of energy bearing down on you!" Ukyou winced at the memory.

"No," he said in response. "No. It isn't."

For a few seconds, she started at him, and then briefly at Ryu. He could see how his words bounced around in her mind as she thought more about it, and tried to assimilate it. She didn't become discourage, like a part of him had feared. She learned. She kept trying. And it impressed him.

And he wished he'd seen this side of her a year ago.

In the light of adversity, her _ki_ was a beautiful beacon, and he wanted to see it shine out in the open. He wasn't done. Not yet. As promised, there would be more. As promised, he would make every moment of training more difficult than the last. Only on the edge of breaking could she grasp that light inside her that he saw behind her eyes.

_Mada mada._

___Not just yet. _


	35. Not Yet or Kuonji Counterattack! II

The twenty first of November came more quickly than Konatsu could have imagined.

Waiting in the dojo proper, he saw another individual enter. There was a small crowd already in attendance; people who had heard that a duel was about to take place, and who had decided to drop by to check it out. A few of these were Dojo regulars he had seen before, and some of the others were mentors of the 'kids' in the two new squads. The only conspicuous absences were those of India Squad, who had been sent off over a day ago on a mission and had yet to return.

"Not expecting this much attendance, eh?"

The question came from Konatsu's own mentor, Sergeant Mario Feretti, and the only person he had actually asked to come (besides Ukyou of course). Over the last month, Konatsu had developed an appreciation for the man's wisdom and council. Secretly, he thought of the Italian as sort of like a laid back older brother. Mario didn't seem the least bit put off by Konatsu's peculiarities, and he had always kept an open ear when the young ninja felt overwhelmed and under prepared for his new profession.

The other man wasn't very interested in martial arts, but he was concerned about how Konatsu's feelings towards Ukyou could interfere with his job. Mario had suggested talking to the girl about things, and this was one bit of advice Konatsu hadn't been able to take. He knew Ukyou wouldn't want to talk about that sort of thing, (the awkwardness of it aside) and that if he tried to engage her in that sort of conversation as they were now it would only end in a pitiable rejection.

She had to see the real him.

Then, only then, could he have a chance of standing up to Ranma by comparison.

"No," Konatsu replied sadly. "This is Shampoo's doing…"

"You sure you want to go through with this?" Sergeant Feretti asked, his hands in his pants pockets as he glanced casually around the room. "You know there's talk about how Juliet Squad is still struggling to find common ground."

"We have our common ground," Konatsu said in return. "The problem is when we get back home. Saotome-taichou has tried to rein things in, but he doesn't like being… hard on people. But I think things have gotten better, not worse."

"After all this, you can say that?" Keretti sighed and shook his head, walking a few feet to stand next to the younger soldier. "You're a surprising guy, Konatsu. I think I'd be pretty bitter if I were in your shoes."

The _shinobi _chuckled good-naturedly. "You'd never fit in my size 8s, I'm afraid."

"Egh! I wouldn't want to!"

For a few seconds they smiled and laughed, before a chime interrupted them, signaling the time.

"Noon..." Konatsu closed his eyes and mentally went over his gear. Then he felt a familiar presence enter the room, and he opened his eyes. It was Ukyou. She walked in, and he went over what he saw in preparation for the fight to come. He already knew about her new battle spatula, but not about its full range of abilities. Ukyou had always wielded her traditional battlespat with bare hands, but now she wore fairly heavy gloves. She also wore scout type light personal armor, rather than full kit (he wore much the same under his carmine colored _kunoichi _uniform), and a fully stocked bandoleer over that. With her hair tied together behind her neck into a ponytail, rather than just behind her ears letting it fall freely; she looked to be all business.

With all that on, it was impossible to identify any sort of injuries.

That was just as well. His natural instinct as a ninja was to seek out and exploit any injury or weakness in a target, even in an 'honest' duel. He'd seen Ukyou before, coming from her training with India Squad, wrapped in bandages and limping. He wondered if she had trained just as hard by herself over the last thirty hours since India Squad had left, or if she'd taken a break to build up her stamina and heal the last of her lingering wounds.

"Miss Ukyou," he approached her, and bowed his head politely. "Thank you very much for coming."

She bowed back, though not quite as deeply. "Let's both do our best."

"Yes!" he agreed, though inside he ran her tone of voice over and over for any sign of sarcasm. No: no he didn't think there had been any. She didn't sound angry, either. Without further formality, the two entered the separate half of the dojo designated for serious duels. It was the same one India and Juliet Squad used for serious training.

Despite knowing the dimensions of the room by memory already, he instinctively looked for anything in the environment that could be used to his advantage. There was nothing, of course. The room was square, with nothing sticking out on the walls or ceiling. There was nothing to hide behind, use as cover, no lights to take out (sheltered as they were behind a transparent version of that alien metal), and nothing beside the _tatami_ mats to use as makeshift shields or weapons. That put him at something of a disadvantage, but he wasn't too worried. It was just a bit of an inconvenience.

On the plus side, he didn't have to worry about collateral damage here.

"Miss Ukyou," he took the opportunity to say one last thing. "Please defend yourself effectively."

"You, too, sugar," she said with a smile. "Shall we?"

Konatsu was on the verge of speaking, having just opened his mouth, when he saw it: Ukyou's _Kizashi_. This was similar to what _Sakkijutsu_ was for _ki_, except relating to physical movements and intentions. _Kizashi_ was the natural intention, thoughts and movements that occur before one acts and a high level martial artist could read it quite clearly in a lower level one. Even the alien enemy (probably) could be read in this fashion, provided one survived enough encounters to become sensitive to it.

His eyes moved instantly from Ukyou's face to her feet. She was moving, and fast, too. Her right foot was already skimming just over the surface of the floor as she began an _Akichi _movement – though the 'vacant land' technique was known by many names, like flying step, and severing step, they were variations on the same speed technique. He hadn't thought that Ukyou knew it, however. It involved using one's _ki_ to drastically reduce the friction in one (or both feet) during a charge, while at the same time creating massive momentum with a different limb, usually the other leg.

"Not enough!" he thought, and pivoted to the side as the flat of her battle spatula filled the space he had occupied a heartbeat ago. At almost the same instant, Ukyou shifted her grip, and the flat of the spatula turned into the edge headed right in his direction in a horizontal slash.

_Hirazuki_…!

But with a something much larger than a sword! Combining the _Hirazuki_ and the _Akichi _must have been quite energy intensive, since the former put strain on the legs muscles, and the latter on the upper arms and thighs. It was a good move, though. Right off the bat, she'd impressed him. Flexing his wrist just right, he activated the hidden springs concealed behind the cloth around his forearms as he raised his arms.

Twin _tonfa_ sprung into position, blocking Ukyou's blade with a clang.

To her credit, Ukyou didn't show any surprise by the move. Her left foot skidded across the ground as she shifted position and took the opportunity to strike with the blunt end of the battle spatula. That end was weighted, he knew, and rather than trying to block it he used his upper body speed to lean away and avoid it. He felt rather than saw Ukyou's right foot scoot forward under cover of the move, and he lifted his own foot before she could trip him.

Tricky!

It also stole any chance he had for a powerful counterattack, and he had to settle for adjusting his balance, and striking with a snap kick. Ukyou let her momentum carry her into a lower stance, and the kick passed well over her shoulder. Not letting him see, even for an instant, her back, she pushed off with her left foot and into a reverse thrust. With beguiling ease, he planted his foot on the blunt end of the spatula as it shot towards him, and commandeering some of her own strength, he took to the air and flipped over her head.

Turning in midair, he raised his _tonfa _again to block as Ukyou spun her weapon in her hands as both a defensive shield and an offensive strike. She was collected, cool, and the moment his feet got within an inch of the ground, she was ready to resume her offensive. She used her battle spatula like a staff, now, or maybe a _naginata_, as she brought both ends into play. A high strike was avoided, but he had to ducked low and leveled his arm to block a strike to the midsection. Pushing the weapon aside to force an opening, he lunged low towards her pelvis.

Pivoting slightly, Ukyou avoided a potentially fight ending blow to her upper left hip. Falling back, Konatsu back flipped out of her counter-counter strike and kicked out with his right leg nicking her in the stomach. Maneuvering with his hands a hundred and eighty degrees, still upside down, he kicked again, this time forward with his other leg. Ukyou blocked it with the shaft of her Hera-sama, and then ducked and spun, reversing the grip on her weapon to hit him in his vulnerable left elbow.

It was a bad position he'd gotten himself into.

Pushing off with his upper body strength, he shifted the part of him that was struck from the elbow to the forearm, guarded as it was by the _tonfa_. It wasn't a clean block, though, and the force of it sent him tumbling. Rolling from the fall, he was on his feet in a second, around the same time Ukyou got back into a standing fighting posture.

Rolling his shoulders, he heard a few pops of protest from his bones.

"It would seem you are quite proficient in the close and medium range, Miss Ukyou," Konatsu said, and he rotated his wrists, retracting the _tonfa_. "I'm afraid I'll have to soften you up a bit."

"That would seem the prudent thing to do," she agreed, holding a wide grip on her Hera-sama.

"Then…" Konatsu's hands crossed in a blur. "Kunoichi Ninpou! Füjin Seikyü Senpu!"

By the look on her face, he knew this was her first time seeing the move, as a hundred slips of paper exploded outwards in a storm before converging on her position. The Heartless Bill Whirlwind was not in and of itself very dangerous, but that fact was not immediately apparent to those on the receiving end of it. Ukyou spun her battle spatula in furious figure eights moving to the left and right. The second her eyes left him, Konatsu made his move.

"An opening!" he yelled, stepping into his own _Akichi_. The weakness of _Akichi_, or any similar speed enhancing move, was that it only worked in one direction. Once you started moving on that vector, forward, backward or to the sides in any degree, you had to stop yourself completely to change direction. Sliding extremely low and close to the ground, almost skating off it like it were ice, he pushed off with his hands and kicked upwards. It was the weakest angle of Ukyou's defense – from below.

Reacting quickly, she let her body go limp a moment before his heel introduced itself to her chin. Twisting in the air from the blow, Konatsu was about to move in for a second strike when a flurry of mini-spatulas, which Ukyou used like throwing knives, threatened to intercept his motion. Raising both hands, he moved like a blur. By the time Ukyou landed on her feet, he stood with three of her mini-spatulas in each hand, caught deftly between his fingers.

Snapping his fingers out, he threw them to the side.

"That was pretty good, Konatsu-kun," Ukyou said, wiping a bit of blood from the corner of her mouth. "Now, let me show you something…"

She then detached some sort of container from the strap on her shoulder, and fitted it into place on the inside of her forearm, just below the wrist. Then, she popped the cap on it, letting it hang from a short plastic cord. Holding out her battle spatula, Ukyou concentrated, and swiped her free hand past her other wrist while pulling back on her weapon. Her free hand thus passed down to the wide flat face of the mega spatula, leaving a trail of smoke in its wake.

Konatsu's eyes widened, realizing what she had done.

Ukyou pulled back her hand, and turned it palm up, revealing a fully cooked plain okonomiyaki(or 'japanese pizza' as some called it) with no extra toppings. Having worked for her in her restaurant for long enough, he understood this new twist on her traditional fighting style. Ukyou's family used a grill to cook materials subsequently used in special techniques, as well as to earn a living. Without said grill, they could not fight to their full effectiveness.

Ukyou's new spatula, however, solved that problem. The reason she wore heavy gloves was because the spatula was also a grill itself, and could heat up enough to flash cook okonomiyaki in a single pass. The container she'd attached to the inside of her right hand wrist was some sort of batter mixture. The product of this probably didn't taste very good, but it could be used for Kuonji style special techniques.

"Well? What do you think, Konatsu-kun?" she asked, narrowing her eyes.

"Interesting…" He grinned, and a half dozen shuriken appeared between his fingers. "Miss Ukyou! Very interesting!"

With a savage cry, okonomiyaki met shuriken, exploding in midair.

* * *

Osaka

Kuonji's was a small okonomiyaki and yakitori restaurant in the famous shopping districts of southern Osaka. In comparison to many nearby establishments, only the nearby Oda Tonkatsu could claim to attract more of the carnivorously inclined. Kuonji's was known among the business crowd for fair prices and generous portions, and come lunch hour it was frequently packed tight with businessmen, hungry shoppers, sports enthusiasts, and even the occasional tourist.

An open kitchen and large grill invited all to witness the preparation of culinary art in the form of piping hot okonomiyaki, cooked in a family style purported to be over two hundred years old, or in an assortment of other treats. Skewered grilled chicken wings marinated in a savory concoction of soy sauce, sugar, sake and _mirin _sated the hunger of a group of men taking a break from work. Elsewhere, a pretty twenty-something college girl enjoyed chicken meatballs and _Yaki-onigiri_ – rice balls roasted to crunchy golden perfection.

Overseeing it all, the gruff looking but friendly grill master looked up to greet every new customer.

"Welcome to Kuonji's!" Kazuo Kuonji's deep voice boomed as the newcomer stepped through the beaded screen door. The man was alone, and a moment later an attentive female waitress guided him over to the bar. He was a tall fellow, given that he was Japanese and not foreign, with a long blue traveling coat. A curtain of short black hair hid his eyes, and he had a beard more closely cut than Kazuo's own.

His mere presence screamed Martial Artist to the grill master's refined senses.

He could smell it on the man.

"What'll it be, pal?" Kazuo asked, his hands cooking up an okonomiyaki and adding the necessary ingredients without needing his eyes for supervision. The newcomer stared for a few seconds at the menu the waitress had handed him.

"This looks good," the man said, putting the menu down. "I'll have the 'deluxe with everything and then some' and a glass of water."

"Comin' right up!" Kazuo went through making another dish for another customer while he got the batter going. While waiting for those to cook, he quickly poured a glass of water, saturated it with ice from an old fashioned ice box, and handed it to the new arrival.

"I'd like to ask…" the man began, taking hold of his drink. "Is this the same style of okonomiyaki that they used to serve in Ucchans, in Tokyo?"

"Oh? So that explains it, then," Kazuo said with a small smile. "Yes. Ukyou's my daughter, and heir to the family style."

"I see! Shame about that mess a while back. I hope she's alright."

"The restaurant was destroyed, but she wasn't there at the time," Kazuo explained, and then realized he hadn't introduced himself yet. "My name is Kazuo, by the way. Kuonji Kazuo."

"Hibiki. Hibiki Tetsuya," the tall man replied, with a bow of his own. "Pleased to meet you."

"Likewise," Kazuo said, and flipped an okonomiyaki on the grill nearby. Four others were just ready, and he tapped a small bell to summon one of his two waitresses. With a single motion each, he flipped the four servings into the air and onto a plate. "Order up! Number 24!"

One of the girls came by, apparently used to the acrobatic presentation of foodstuffs, and headed over to a table of hungry customers. Kazuo continued with his cooking, realizing that this Tetsuya person was watching him closely, though not directly. The smell of burning leaves emanating from the man became stronger. It was how Kazuo conceptualized his _ki_, and the _ki_ of others. For most people, it was subdued completely so that they smelt of nothing at all. This Hibiki fellow was completely different.

A part of Kazuo wanted to ask him why he was here, what he'd thought of Ucchan's back in Nerima, or a half dozen other things. Not to pass the time, but to try and discern why this obviously powerful martial artist was here. His instinct was telling him that it wasn't just for an affordable and delicious lunch.

"Here ya go!" He handed Hibiki a plate with the house special: 'everything and then some.' It was quite a meal, stuffed high with seafood, pork, and veggies.

"Thank you!" Tetsuya said in English, without even mispronouncing the 't,' bespeaking some practice with the American language. He immediately started to dig in with a true martial artist's appetite. For a few minutes, Kazuo allowed himself to forget about the man's powerful and dangerous smelling _ki_, as the next order came for some yakitori and two small okonomiyakis.

Those few minutes passed all too soon.

"Wow! That was really very good! The Kuonji Style really does live up to its culinary reputation!" Tetsuya said amiably, picking the last bit off his plate and washing it down by finishing the water in his glass.

"Thank you for the compliments," Kazuo replied, bowing his head slightly. He was about to turn and start on the bill when the other man coughed politely.

"However…" Tetsuya continued, speaking more slowly and purposefully. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to make something of a scene, shortly. By the motions of your hands, and the slight hesitation in your voice, you must have suspected I was here for more than a good meal. So this shouldn't come as a great surprise."

Kazuo sighed. "I suppose so. If it isn't too much trouble, can you let the others finish their food? I wouldn't want to hurt this restaurant's reputation."

Tetsuya smiled calmly. "I understand completely. Please make whatever preparations you like."

"Hotaru-chan!" Kazuo quickly singled out one of his waitresses and brought her over to the grill. "Could you please put up the closed sign? Then make sure the customers know that, due to an emergency that is forcing us to close for an hour or so, they should take their food and enjoy it outside in the fresh air. Also…" he frowned a bit. "Also tell them that their food is free, again, due to this emergency forcing us to close up."

Tetsuya watched at the girl did as she'd been told, and in a few minutes, the last customer left, and the chairs and tables had been put away. The eminent grill master then politely told his two waitresses to take a break of a few hours. Then, with a certain amount of resignation, he went back behind the grill and retrieved something: a spatula as tall as he was, with a blade wider than his chest. White tape circled the gripping areas, partly covering an engraving of a dragon with bells on its body that coiled around the shaft of the weaponized utensil.

"May I ask…" Kazuo tied a white chef's headband in place, and slipped on a bandoleer of smaller spatulas. "Why you want to fight me? Do you have a grudge with our family?"

"Not at all," Tetsuya answered, crossing his arms behind his back. "I found your food to be exceptionally good, your service polite and fast. I have never actually been to Ucchans, but I've heard it is of quite the same level of service."

"Then why do you challenge me?" Kazou asked, shouldering his battle spatula.

"I've been told to evaluate your usefulness and the power of your martial arts style," Tetsuya spoke as casually as if he were drawing mention to the pleasant weather outside. "If you survive, then I'll take you to see some of my associates."

"And Ukyou?"

"No." The tall man shrugged. "We don't have her. But… you should be stronger than her anyway. So: let's see if I'm told to let you live."

Kazuo inhaled, and smelt burning leaves all around him. Rather than wait for an attack to come, however, he walked around the grill, and charged. He was deceptively strong, even for the barrel-chested middle aged man he seemed to be. One swipe of the family's strongest battle spatula, _Suzu-hime_, recast from a melted down Buddhist bell, could slice anything!

Hibiki Tetsuya simply held up his hand.

* * *

Hera-sama's killing edge cut clean through the _Kawarimi_, neatly bisecting the makeshift straw dummy that had, just a moment ago, taken the place of the real Konatsu. Spinning her weapon overhead, Ukyou stomped down with her right foot to cut short her lateral motion. Twice, the sound of metal deflecting metal filled the air as Konatsu descended from above, pushing off from the ceiling to build power.

The nimble _shinobi_ used her deflection to pinwheel, not towards the ground, but off to another wall. The moment his feet found purchase on it, he stepped into a speed technique, disappearing in a blur of motion. There was no time to focus on grand strategy or the nuances of offense, as her arms worked to deflect a blow coming in from her left that came as little more than a mirage or blur, even to her enhanced combat attuned senses.

Konatsu's speed was frightening as he shot across the room in a single step, spring boarding off the walls. A parallel blow was met by Hera-sama, and as he rolled past her and tried to hit her in the small of the back, she pivoted and brought the flat of her battle spatula around just barely in time to block. She saw him for a moment, police baton shaped _tonfa_ whirling through the air, and then he jumped into another speed step.

Swiping her free hand down her battle spatula, she whipped up another okonomiyaki _special order to go_.

"Okonomiyakidan! Ichi!" she cried, left hand swiping back and forth. "Ni! San!"

This special okonomiyaki had, as one of its new ingredients, a proximity fuse.

"Shi! Go!"

She barely saw him try to cover himself in mid step as the first of the bomb went off in a cloud of batter and shrapnel.

"Roku! Shichi!"

Even after she lost sight of him in the cloud of debris, she kept at it, saturating the area. Konatsu had already proven surprisingly resilient, not to mention difficult to hit in the first place, and she knew she had to keep him pinned down. She was in the middle of her eighth okonomiyaki bomb when she caught movement, and the color red, reflected in the surface of Hera-sama.

"Whaaaat!" She spun, and brought her weapon up to block just in time. Konatsu was in the air, sword drawn and bearing down on her. Their weapons met at the same time one, and then two, versions of the ninja erupted out of the smoke.

_Rokubu__Ichitai_ !

No doubt, he'd performed it under the cover of smoke. In fact, that third bomb had produced much more smoke than it should have. He must've waited for it to go off, and then timed his own smoke bomb to explode at the same time. Then, while she'd been distracted, he'd gotten behind her, or under some sort of cover, and executed the six bodies as one technique.

"Prepare yourself…!" The clone to her left cried, twirling a sickle with chain, called a _kusarigama_.

"…Miss Ukyou!" The one to her right finished, wielding the _tonfa_.

"Don't… underestimate me!" Ukyou pushed forward with her Hera-sama while sliding it down, until the flat of the battle spatula got within a few inches of the first Konatsu's right shoulder. "Kuonji Big Bang Odoroki!"

A tiny slit in Hera-sama opened up, spraying a volatile mixture onto the face of the now heated weapon. The sword armed Konatsu didn't have time to register much after this fact, as the mixture ignited in a magnificent explosion of cherry red and burning orange. Taking the Big Bang Surprise to the face sent that Konatsu flying, but Ukyou kept her weapon heading in an arc towards the floor while the adjusted her grip.

Pole vaulting into the air, she saw the two Konatsu clones cross below her, passing through the space she had just stood in. Her feet touched down with a ballerina's grace, and then another Konatsu was in front of her with a pair of three pronged _sai_ held in the reverse grip. Ducking her head, the first cut through a few strands of her hair, and as it came back in the other direction, it met Hera-sama's shaft. The other twin in the_ sai_ pair nicked her shoulder as it jabbed, but then Ukyou brought her battle spatula up, perpendicular with her torso, locking that Konatsu's arms together and sending him corkscrewing through the air.

Falling back, stopping her fall only with her hand, she avoided a thrown sickle, and then falling awkwardly to her left she saw a trio of kogai, or ornamental hairpins, embed themselves in the ground. Flipping up with her feet and bringing down her weapon to intercept a roundhouse kick, she ran her hand hastily down her weapon – too fast too cook the batter into a bomb or other special okonomiyaki. The sticky dough itself would have to suffice as it flew into Konatsu's face, forcing him (or that clone of him) to stumble backwards.

"Happö Bijin Shuriken!" came from behind.

"Hyappatsu Hyakuchü Shuriken!" came from her right.

Ukyou cursed, and her body reacted instantly to find the right angle to shield herself. Konatsu wasn't able to put as much raw edged steel in the air as Mousse in terms of mass, but with his clones, he could hit from multiple angles. This was where all that painful training with India Squad had paid off. They had already threatened and hurt her as much as Konatsu was ever likely to, and she knew – she believed – that she could block everything he threw at her. Finding shelter behind the broad flat face of Hera-sama, Ukyou heard the rainfall of projectiles bounce harmlessly off its nigh invulnerable surface leaving her unscathed.

Standing and backpedaling, Ukyou prepared for the next attack as she caught her breath and surveyed the room and the state of her opponent. The smoke was clear now, and she could see all six Konatsu clones. One still had batter on his face that he was trying to wipe off (good luck – she'd made it extra sticky), another had a dislocated arm, another was on the ground, unconscious, and another looked mostly unharmed but a bit dusty. Near the back of the room that she had carpet bombed, one Konatsu had used the other as a shield.

That was the 'real' one then.

That Konatsu dropped his unconscious fellow and stepped forward. "I'd never imagined you'd get this much stronger in only a week, Miss Ukyou. It would seem that my _kunoichi_ ninja arts are not enough to end this battle through anything but attrition."

"Huh!" Ukyou said in response. "You sound like I had a lot of options. Training like I have, I had to either get stronger or give up my title as a martial artist. This last week, I remembered… Konatsu-kun! I remembered that my cooking and my martial arts are the core of who I am. One cannot be separated from the other!"

"Have you been training just for that?" he asked, as the other Konatsu clones took steps back and fanned out.

"At first, it was to prove something to Shampoo, to you, to Ranma…" She gulped in another deep breath of air, let it out, and licked her dry lips. "But then, at some point, I realized what I was thinking about when I was on the ground, bleeding and hurt… and wondering why I should get back up."

Ukyou's blue eyes hardened to the shade of ice.

"The person I have something to prove to is myself! Win or lose, come tomorrow morning I'm going to look the mirror and I'm going to smile and be proud of who I see!"

Konatsu's expression looked pained for a moment before being replaced by one of determination. Setting his feet and widening his stance he clasped his hands together. Ukyou could feel the pull of his _ki_, building up in his abdomen and spreading out through his body. Her own power rose to meet it, and push against the opposing emotional and spiritual energy.

"Then... Miss Ukyou!" Konatsu suddenly yelled. "For the sake of your pride, so that you can look at yourself in the mirror and smile, I will show you something no one has yet seen and lived to speak of! My _kunoichi_ ninja arts do not seem up to this task, so now… now I shall unlock the forbidden male _ninjutsu _passed onto me by my father, and his father before him. The arts I was forced to learn in secret and hide from my step sisters. Watch, Miss Ukyou, and see why I have been called a once in a hundred years ninja genius!"

"Higouhou Ninpo!"  
(Unlawful Ninja Arts!)

Curling their fingers, Konatsu and two of his doubles slammed their palms together.

"Akazuno Ninpou: Sanmi Ichitai!"

(Forbidden Ninja Art: Three People as One!)

Without warning, the two unconscious Konatsus and the one with the dislocated arm disappeared in little puffs of smoke, revealing rough straw _kawarimis_ – body replacements. The three remaining ninjas stood perfectly still for a second, and that was when Ukyou felt it… the _ki_ that had been radiating from the real Konatsu and his duplicates abruptly doubled.

"What the…?" Ukyou staggered, the weight of his spiritual pressure overwhelming her senses. "What the hell!"

The left and right Konatsus reached behind themselves, and both of their hands came back cradling no less than eight shuriken each between their fingers. The center Konatsu, meanwhile, drew his _wakazashi_ short sword. With glowing eyes, he started to walk forward.

"Kansatsuken!" he announced, and his next step was an _Akichi_ that momentarily looked like he'd completely vanished. If her eyes had wandered the slightest bit, he would have as good as disappeared – his speed covered the distance between them faster than she'd ever imagined, and he was leading with his blade, the tip and length inky black rather than reflective steel.

Still, he seemed to be off target. Her natural impulse was to dodge a strike like that, but India Squad's training and some distant sense of danger warned her not to. Instead, she brought the flat of her battle spatula up to the side of her right arm, using it like a _de facto_ buckler or shield, using the shaft and the end to guard her entire right arm and torso.

The two passed in a spray of sparks, Konatsu's "Flying Killer Sword" biting much more deeply against her battle spatula than she had expected. It was as if the tip of the sword was somewhere else entirely rather than at the end of the blade. Had she tried to dodge, rather than use her spatula for defense, she'd have been hit.

No doubt about it.

He was behind her now, and she was all but surrounded. Moving quickly into a side step, she presented her armored side again as the first Konatsu, the real one, expertly reversed the grip on his short sword and slashed at her. Ukyou felt the cut, this time, opening up on the side of her neck. She'd seen the blade hit her spatula, she was sure of it. How did she get cut!

Still side stepping to keep her back to one of the walls, Ukyou gritted her teeth and swung Hera-sama in a short fast arc, forcing Konatsu to block with his sword. She didn't get into a press of blades with him, instead keeping her battle spatula moving and building up speed and momentum. Konatsu matched her every move, blocking or avoiding blows, and every time his _wakazashi_ slashed, it bit into flesh, though her exotic alloy body armor prevented any potentially crippling blows to her upper torso.

Frustrated, and growing a little anxious, she swiped wide with the flat of her weapon, forcing him to take a little step back. Searching his face, she saw cold blank eyes, devoid of emotion, a deep deathly white. She knew it was his spiritual pressure overcoming her own, making her afraid, and making her see things. She couldn't panic. She had to keep her cool.

She was bleeding, and she knew it.

Not only that, but her _ki _was waning. A few of the hits he'd gotten over the last exchange had obviously been deeper than expected. Her vision started to blur, but she shook her head and forced her eyes to concentrate on her opponent.

"That would be the poison coursing through your veins…" Konatsu said, his voice sounding far closer than where he stood. It sounded almost like he was whispering directly into her ear.

"My _wakazashi_ is named Habu, after the nocturnal pit vipers of the Ryukyu Islands. Like the snake, it is not usually aggressive... however, if sufficiently provoked, their bite is excruciatingly painful. Miss Ukyou, my Habu has bitten you several times. Soon, you will no longer be able to fight me."

"I'm afraid," she heard as her vision faded. "This fight is over."


	36. Not Yet or Kuonji Counterattack! III

Wind bites my face.

The sea lunges and crushes all in its path.

There is nothing in the sky.

Weariness pulls me down, slows me down; my arms grow limp.

Blue and black.

I see the dark sky and then nothing else.

Pain.

A ray of light, sometime later – the rising sun.

There is a shadow too, large, with a familiar smell that makes me feel safe.

Papa.

* * *

Ukyou woke up in a bed, wrapped snugly under two layers of sheets. Reaching up, she could feel bandages around her head, and the memories of the night before came back like a slideshow: the storm interrupting her training, her mad impulse to keep going despite it, the crash of the waves and the surf, growing weaker but refusing to give up, and then that fall onto one of the concrete wave breakers, hitting her head, the rising sun set against a comfortingly large silhouette. 

Still, though she knew she should be badly hurt, she felt…

Almost invigorated.

Inhaling, she smelt her father enter before he actually did, carrying a tray with a breakfast okonomiyaki with minced eggs and shredded bacon. It had always been her childhood favorite, and seeing him set it down on the table next to her, in a hotel room far from their home in Osaka, brought unexpected tears to her eyes. By the tired look in his eyes, she knew – just knew – that he had stood by all last night, watching her fight the sea, not stepping in until she had slipped and fallen. She squeezed her eyes shut, and ducked her head low to bury her face in the pillow.

Crying over something stupid like that!

She wasn't a weak little girl anymore! She'd renounced her femininity and devoted herself to becoming a serious martial artist so that she could finally avenge the insult to her family honor. There was no room in that notion for sentimental tears. A gentle hand rested on her forehead, and Ukyou opened her eyes to look up at her father. He had always seemed like a giant of a man to her, bigger even than Ranma's father Genma, and much more imposing and stern.

"Rest up, Ukyou-chan. Rest up," was all he said, in that moment when any other parent would likely have scolded her for her foolishness. Her father had always been more talkative with customers than family.

"Papa…" she replied lamely, and a small smile graced her face. "Thanks."

"I just hope you found what you were looking for, honey," he said with a broad warm smile partly hidden by his thick black beard. "Because another night like that will give Papa a lot of nasty gray hairs."

She nodded back to reassure him, and as he started for the door, she called out to him. For some reason, her recent new feeling of renewal had also forced a more unpleasant question to the front of her mind. It was, after all, the reason she had risked life and limb to train against a raging sea.

"Papa, why… why did you try to marry me off to the Saotomes?"

Her father's shoulders slumped slightly, and he turned away so she saw him in profile. He seemed to struggle with an answer, but when he faced her a few seconds later; she knew to brace herself for what was to come. She had often hypothesized about his motives, but still being a young girl, she knew she was probably off base. She was thirteen now, though. She was ready for the truth.

"Ukyou-chan," he said with a deep rumble. "I love you with all my heart, honey. Don't think I wanted you to leave my side, but… but I thought a stricter, stronger, martial arts upbringing would be what was best for you. Genma is a stronger man than he looks; stronger than me in quite a few ways. For a Kuonji, our cooking and our martial arts are one and the same."

"I don't need them to become strong, Papa!" she raised her voice only a little, not wanting to strain herself. "We don't need them to become strong. I'll train, and I'll train, and I'll beat Ranma! I'll prove we don't need them!"

"Revenge," her father said the word slowly, and sighed. "Ukyou-chan, do you know why we of the Kuonji Clan became both chefs and martial artists?"

"To defend ourselves," Ukyou answered, knowing the story about how her ancestors had grown weary of being assaulted and robbed on their journeys, and how they had trained to become both master chefs and fighters.

"And to defend our honor!" she added.

"There is that," he admitted. "But you are forgetting something very important... something without which the Art of making okonomiyaki has no meaning."

"Something without which the Art has no meaning?" she repeated, and mulled over that, searching her memory for an answer. She normally had a good memory, but this time nothing was forthcoming.

"You think about that, honey," her father said after a few silent moments. "You'll know the answer some day, and when you do, you'll understand it instead of just recite it. Rest up, now. Tomorrow, I'll put those skills of yours to test on the grill."

"Right!" she replied, watching him leave and slowly close the door behind him.

* * *

Ukyou opened her eyes.

* * *

She watched as a black suited man ushered the woman and her baby into the van. The shock of the ordeal was still clearly etched on her features, but so was the obvious relief and gratitude she felt towards the men and women who had saved her and her child. There had been another survivor, too, a man – the woman's husband. They would be checked over more carefully, and then their memories of the night's horrific events would be erased. 

"We saved them, Ran-chan," she had said, watching the van drive off.

Next to her, Ranma, still wearing his armor and faceplate, nodded. "Yeah. We did..." she could see his face, but she knew he was smiling, really smiling. "Come on. Let's get moving."

* * *

"…you are forgetting something very important... something without which the Art of making okonomiyaki has no meaning." 

And she realized what that was.

Other People.

The customers who frequented her restaurant, who smiled and laughed and ordered 'their usual' or 'their regular.' The strangers who came in, looking around a little quizzically, but who smiled when she greeted them with a friendly word of welcome. The guys and girls at school, and at Furinkan High, who crowded around whenever she started to cook for Ranma or herself. Their faces flashed by, in ones, twos, and groups.

And Ukyou opened her eyes.

* * *

"I'm afraid," Konatsu said, slowly, holding his _wakazashi _at shoulder level. "This fight is over." 

And then he tasted it: something spicy and strong that send a shock down his spine. He narrowed his eyes. Ukyou had been slumping over, on the verge of collapsing, but then she had started to straighten up. Her eyes were open and focused on him. Her hand clenched tightly on the shaft of her battle spatula, and her _ki _– which had been fading into near nonexistence – was again pouring out of her body.

Behind a transparent wall, Ranma felt it, too, and saw it: the lines crisscrossing around Ukyou's body, moving through her hands like a spider web of energy. He whistled appreciatively. Next to him, Shampoo's eyes were wide and shocked. Around Ukyou, she could feel the thickness of the air changing, brushing over her skin like wind, despite the impossibility of such a sensation through the solid exotic alloy wall that separated them.

"She..." the Chinese girl began to say. "How could she...?"

Back inside the room, Ukyou lifted her battle spatula and held it in a cross guard in front of her.

"This fight isn't over just yet…!" She spun her weapon once, and the circular bottom pommel detached. Building up its momentum with a twist of her hips, she launched the circular projectile at the still stunned Konatsu. Without thinking, he blocked it with his sword, but instead of deflecting, it rolled off and wrapped around the blade. It was then that a thin metal wire became easily visible in the air, connecting the tied up body of his _wakazashi_ to the end of her heavier battle spatula.

"That sword… is really troublesome!" She pulled back, hard, and Konatsu had to dig his feet into the floor to keep from either being pulled off his feet or having his sword wrenched from his hands.

Setting herself in place, Ukyou raised her left hand, and placed it directly on the flat face of Hera-sama. In her mind, she could see it: the _ki_. Her _ki_. Not just the light of it, but the substance and the form. In her mind, to her senses, it was like the ingredients in a recipe. All it took was a little of this, some of that, all in the right proportions with a little heat from her grill…

Her hand started to glow.

"Miss Ukyou… you…!" Konatsu tried to wrest his sword free, but the wire didn't give. Reaching behind his back with his left hand, he retrieved a quartet of shuriken, and his hand snapped out, releasing the bladed projectiles.

"Shuriken Kakezan!" he cried, and the four projectiles became sixteen. He'd expected her to move, to hide and interrupt whatever she was trying to do with her _ki_, but instead she held her battle spatula up, just high enough to cover her face and upper body. She barely flinched when six of the sixteen shuriken hit her. Some bounced harmlessly off her armor, but one imbedded in the unarmored body glove that covered the space between her foot and her shin. Another cut into her flesh, just to the left of her right kneecap.

_Shuriken Kakezan_, or Shuriken Multiplication was not to be confused with a _kunoichi _technique like _Hyappatsu Hyakuchü Shuriken _(100 thrown 100 middle shuriken) that relied on an illusion to create extra projectiles. With Shuriken Multiplication, the extra projectiles were quite real.

"Alright… alright! I see!" Konatsu held up two fingers, and focused his energy into them and into his two clones. "Let us put an end to this, Miss Ukyou!"

The other two Konatsu's took a step forward, brandishing four shuriken in each hand. Meanwhile, the glow beneath Ukyou's hand began to take form and shape, developing into a twirling discus of vibrant gold. As her _ki_ built up to a whirling crescendo the ribbon in her hair came undone, flapping away and hitting the wall behind her.

"This is your last chance, Konatsu-kun," Ukyou raised her voice to make sure he could hear her. "Your last chance to give up!"

"Don't think you can avoid or block this one, Miss Ukyou!" Konatsu, for the first time, let out a savage snarl. "When I unleash **six hundred and forty shuriken**, there will be no where to escape, and if you hide behind your battle spatula, enough will still ricochet off the walls and still hit you from the sides and behind!"

And with that, Ukyou began to move her hand down the length of Hera-sama. Seeing the motion and sensing the release of energy, Konatsu acted. Pointing with his _ki_ charged fingers; his two clones shot their hands out wide. A steel storm of sixteen shuriken filled the air.

"Goudoujutsu: Shuriken Kakezan Kamaitachi!"

(Combination Technique: Shuriken Multiplication Whirlwind!)

And then multiplied into sixty four, and then again, until it seemed like a tidal wave of spinning steel filled half the room, bearing down on the other half. Ukyou's pupils grew small as she saw the oncoming attack, but she pressed onward, trusting in the inner power she had found. Her fingers reached the edge of Hera-sama's heated surface, and then whatever it was, was free. Bright all consuming light filled the world in front of her, and she knew then what to call it.

"Kenran Hinode!"

(Brilliant Sunrise!)

And in the middle of the room, a wave of steel met a column of light.

* * *

"That's the signal. We're go! Go! Go!" 

The four police officers stormed the room. It was a small hotel suite, little more than an L shaped bedroom and a tiny bathroom. There was no where to hide. Two of the officers, covering each other, advanced to the area around the bed itself, finding nothing: not a suitcase, not a hand bag, and certainly not an occupant. From behind them, the officers who had opened the bathroom door cursed.

"Nothing!"

"There's no one here!"

One of the other two quickly pulled aside the drapes covering the wall of the room that overlooked the city. It would have been impossible to hide effectively behind the flimsy things, but it did confirm where the occupant had likely gone. Staring out the open window on the eighteenth floor of the hotel, the officer who led the intrusion cursed. It was a sheer drop.

"This is Blue One," he said, clutching the radio strapped to his upper left chest. "Target is not present. The window is open, but I don't see a body."

"She's headed for the roof," a voice replied over the radio.

"The roof?" the officer looked up; there was no way to find a handhold. Only a human fly could scale the flat surface of the building. "Is that even possible?"

Mousse stood on the top of the building's flagpole, white and black robes billowing in the wind. He watched as a khaki colored form stood on the edge of the roof, a black sash weaving leisurely by her side. Mousse, his hand still on the radio clipped to his robe, depressed the speak button with his middle finger.

"Yeah. It is. Secure the room and fall back. I'll handle things up here," he said, and let his hand release the radio and return to his voluminous sleeves. Jumping down off the four meter high flag pole, he handed softly next to a growling air conditioning unit. The woman lowered her arms, and he could see she was holding folded up _tessen_, or metal fans.

"Hibiki Mitsuko?" Mousse spoke up, watching her closely. Ryouga had warned them that his parents were both martial artists. That she would evade the police they'd gotten to cooperate with this mission didn't surprise anyone. Mousse couldn't quite see her face very clearly, but her stance itself was quite confident. Certainly, she didn't seem to radiate any fear.

"Weighted iron fans and the Iron Cloth Technique," Ryouga had said. "Her ki reserves are not impressive, but she is quite strong and fast. She's not in our league, but don't underestimate her."

"Can I help you?" the woman asked, sounding remarkably polite given the circumstances.

"Hibiki-san. My name is Watanabe Tobi." Mousse tried to sound authoritative but not too threatening. "Please kindly cooperate. You're in danger, and we need to make sure of a few things..."

The woman laughed at that. "I'm in danger? That's a good one! Don't think I don't know what this is about! Well, I have no intention of going to jail because I defended myself from a bunch of lowlife punks!"

"Umm..." Mousse quirked an eyebrow. "What?"

"Trying to take advantage of a poor helpless beautiful _young_ woman lost in the city...!" Mrs. Hibiki suddenly took on a teary eyed look. "Did I go too far when I broke their leader's arm? Perhaps. Did I go too far when I threw one of them through a wall? Maybe. Did I go too far when I made another one eat his cell phone? Ok, yes, I guess I did. But it was self defense! I have a right to defend myself!"

A sweat drop glided down Mousse's forehead. "I guess. But, look... Wait! That's not what this is about!" He shook his head. "Hibiki-san, I'm a friend of your son's. I'm here to help."

"And those cops downstairs?" Mitsuko asked, suddenly turning serious again. "The ones you were giving orders to just now? Are they friends of my son, too?"

"Yes! I mean… no, no, I guess not. But they ARE helping us out. Here, I'll show you!" Mousse reached into his robe, and picked out his National Police Agency Security Bureau badge. With a flick of his wrist, he tossed it at the woman, who effortlessly caught it in midair. Mrs. Hibiki examined it for a few seconds, and scoffed dismissively.

"It's a Fake!" She declared, throwing it back at him.

Mousse caught it without even thinking – his mind was racing, trying to fathom just how this woman had realized the badge wasn't real. Hell, for all intents and purposes, it was real. It was just his false identity that was a fake. How did she know?

"How did I know it was a fake?" Mitsuko asked wonderingly. She then pointed dramatically at Mousse. "When I said it was fake you looked shocked and surprised. That's all the proof I need!"

'She got me!' Mousse drew back guiltily and put the badge away.

"Hibiki-san, you're making this very difficult..." he grumbled. Tucking his hands into his sleeves, he sighed. "All right, if you refuse to cooperate, then we'll do this the hard way."

Without further warning, he slid into a low crouch and spread his arms. A volley of three weighted lengths of chain shot out towards his target. Mrs. Hibiki saw it coming, however, and flipped open her iron fans. With a graceful arc, the fan with the white colored fabric knocked aside the leading metal weight, while the black fan intercepted and captured the second. Easily, using only her wrist, she brought the black fan down to also snare the third length of chain. The fan then snapped tight, and Mrs. Hibiki pulled back using her whole body.

A second later, Mousse crashed face first into an exposed ventilation duct. Pulling himself free, the Chinese martial artist shook his head to get rid of the cobwebs and debris he'd just taken a dive into.

"Ok..." he blew a strand of hair out of his face. "You're definitely the lost boy's mother alright."

* * *

Kuonji Kazou wiped the blood from his broken nose and tried to get back up. 

Behind him, broken bottles leaked alcohol that soaked his clothes and burned his wounds. Purpling bruises covered his left cheek, his arms, and his torso underneath his clothes. Shards of glass and ceramic cut into his lower back and shoulders. Needless to say, the Bar was in no condition to host a respectable business party.

His opponent, one Hibiki Tetsuya, stood unharmed in the center of the restaurant, one hand in his coat pocket, the other hanging leisurely by his side. A few flecks of smoky residue and grime marred his face, but otherwise he looked as fine as when he'd entered and ordered his lunch. Seeing movement out of the corner of his eye, Kazuo quickly reached out...

And caught the bottle of cognac before it could shatter on the floor.

Letting out a huff of mixed relief and self-depreciation, he checked the label on the bottle. What a shame it would have been for some of the truly good stuff to be wasted without ever being tasted. Slowly getting up, ignoring the pain that cried out from every inch of his body, he popped open the top of the cognac and took a draft from it, letting the 80 proof liquid burn down his throat.

Finally on his feet again, he smirked at the man who had so trounced him, and tossed the bottle over in a lazy arc. Tetsuya caught it with one hand, took one look at the label, and laughed. Taking a quick drink of his own from the vintage cognac, he nodded appreciatively. Then, putting the cap back on, Tetsuya leisurely tossed it back.

Kazuo caught it, and carefully put the bottle back on its shelf.

"Hibikiken, was it?" the okonomiyaki chef asked, again facing his foe. "The Echoing Fist? Was that why those Masters you mentioned picked you?"

Tetsuya nodded. "My son's memories of me... of what I could do... interested them."

"And me?" Kazuo asked.

"No. They aren't interested yet." The other man made a sad sigh. "Which is too bad. I don't prefer violence and I don't really like to fight... but if I'm not told otherwise, I'm going to have to kill you."

"That's ok, Tetsuya, wasn't it?" Mr. Kuonji reached down and picked up the family's precious _Suzu-hime_. The battle spatula had been passed down through three generations, and one day, he'd hoped to present to his daughter on the day she married. Too late, he wished he'd called her more often, or that she had called him. He missed the sound of her voice, and how she used to laugh and pull at his beard. Oh, but she hadn't been that young in a long time, had she?

"Tetsuya...-san..." Kazuo's grip tightened on _Suzu-hime_, and he found strength in it. It had not proven able to stand up to the Echoing Fist, but it was intact. Maybe, someday, Ukyou would still take possession of it.

"I am glad I could share a drink with you, Tetsuya-san, but if at all possible, I'd like to keep running my restaurant. I'd hate to upset my regulars, you see." Kazuo chuckled. "And I can't say I'd like to live like you are, made a slave because of my own skills."

"I'd suppose not," the tall man replied, eyes half lidded. Then, sensing the built up of _ki_, he brought his left hand out of his coat pocket.

"Hmmm? What's this?" Tetsuya drawled, eyes tracing the signature lines of _ki_ that grew out from Kazuo's body and insinuated into the walls, into the grill, into the bags of ingredients in the back room, into everything nearby. The beaten man's body began to shake, and in tune, so did the grill plate, the many and assorted utensils, the wok hanging from its hook, even the menus. In seconds, the man's_ ki_ – his mental and spiritual presence – had leaked into the entire room; much like another fighter would channel their energy into a sword or staff.

"This... is the ultimate and final technique of a Master of the Kuonji Style," Kazuo announced. "Beyond making our food, our grill, and our spatulas into weapons, when one becomes a Master of our Art, the kitchen, the tables, the restaurant itself... become both spear and shield!"

Tetsuya smiled, eyes darting back and forth. "Oh?"

"Now!" Kazuo raised his hands. "Arise! Kessen no Ougi: Kuonji Kijiryu!"

(Decisive Battle Secret Technique: Kuonji Batter Dragon!)

Just a few blocks away, five police cars roared down the road, sirens blaring. The streets of Osaka were not particularly wide, and they had to slow down dramatically as they got close to the area where, they had been told, a dangerous suspect was in the middle of a criminal disturbance of the peace. The exact nature of the disturbance and the criminal himself were not well known, just that their superiors were very insistent on cooperation with the local NPA Special Agents in the field.

The first of the cars had just arrived on the scene when a popular local restaurant exploded from the inside, sending out a shockwave of force that knocked people standing on the other side of the street onto their asses and tore signs all along the road off their supports. The two story restaurant's lower floor had just seemed to settle, when the top floor erupted like a volcano, sending debris flying in every direction. Wooden support beams and furniture were launched into the sky, and at the heart of it a brown and black serpentine form rose higher and higher, releasing a roar like an earthquake's and a mouth engulfed by flame.

Then, the serpentine form turned in midair, and headed back to earth, flaking bits of itself trailing away like a pair of torn faux wings. When it hit the ground, it was with the force of a falling star. What was left of the restaurant was instantly flattened. Windows shattered for a hundred feet, and bits and pieces of sticky dough and broken wood rained down like a brown monsoon.

And in the middle of what had once been Kuonji's restaurant, a lone figure stood arms upright. And holding something: an entire grill assemblage, still burning, and weighing as much as a small car. Tossing aside the burning wreckage with apparent ease, the figure turned, as if to look around.

"Almost had me..." Tetsuya whispered, and looked up, sensing the other man's approach. "Kazuo..."

"I'm not done yet!" Kazuo yelled, descending from above with his battle spatula strapped to his back. He landed on a patch of brown batter and slammed his hands down into it.

"Yuusen no Ougi: Kuonji Haimetsuryu!"

(Desperate Battle Secret Technique: Kuonji Scattered Dragon's Defeat!)

Lifting his hands, and slamming them down a second time, hundreds of globs of batter, much of it with shards of metal and wood stuck inside, jumped into the air. Tetsuya barely had time to register this new attack, as the sticky spheres surrounded him, coming in from every possible angle: from the ground, from the ruined skeleton of the building, from what was left of the walls, from everywhere! He tucked his arms over his face a heartbeat before the first bits of batter hit him, and in moments he was completely obscured by an ever thickening shell of the stuff.

"Tetsuya-san, I hope you enjoyed your last drink," Kazuo said, softly, standing up. His body felt about to give out, but at least he was alive. "Now, remain trapped like an insect in amber, entombed for a thousand years."

Wiping blood from his face, and taking in the ruined status of his beloved restaurant, Kazuo wished he'd had that cognac handy. It would be a while before he could rebuild, but in the meantime there was always the portable _yatai_ grill. He turned and began to ponder how he would explain things to the police. Behind him, the jagged pillar of batter and building materials hardened to the consistency of concrete.

The police streamed out of their vehicles and began to tread carefully around the debris. Kazuo was halfway to them, already holding his hands up to try and convince them that he was harmless and unarmed, when he paused. Slowly, he turned and looked behind him, where the sound of something cracking could be heard more and more loudly.

"That... isn't possible..." he began to say, when the massive pillar that was to be Hibiki Tetsuya's tomb cracked clean in half. He could see things moving inside, in the darkness, and then the two halves fell apart completely. Tetsuya himself landed on the ground with a thud, long strips of his navy blue coat torn away and waving in the breeze.

Except... there was no breeze.

"Not enough, Kuonji Kazuo!" Tetsuya yelled, the torn strips of his coat rising higher and thrashing more and more violently in the air. Kazuo gaped, still hardly believing that anyone could have survived the _Haimetsuryu_, and whipped out _Suzu-hime_ just as something fast – lightning fast – streaked through the air. Holding it in front of him like a shield he heard a grinding sound come from the other side of the weapon, and his feet dug twin furrows in the ground as the force of some impact pushed him back.

His pupils grew small as whatever it was on the other side of his battle spatula finally pierced the metal weapon. Something thin and vaguely whip like shot through the gap it had cut in _Suzu-hime_ and proceeded onward just to the right of his face, cutting a line horizontally across his cheek and clipping his earlobe. And then, as fast as it had struck, it retracted and tore his ancestral weapon out of his hands.

So fast!

His clothes still writhing like a nest of vipers, Tetsuya stood like a statue. That was what it had been, Kazuo realized: it had been a strip of the other man's coat that had lashed out and pierced _Suzu-hime_, cutting through it like a drill bit through copper plate. And now, he was helpless. Another of the cloth tendrils drew back, coiled like a snake, and struck.

Only to be stopped mere feet from its target.

A young man stood in front of him, holding something between his hands that had blocked the strike. He looked like JSDF, wearing some sort of white and gray combat vest and pants with a conspicuous black belt. An off color gold and black bandanna and armband stood out in stark contrast. A matte black rifle of some sort was strapped in place behind his back. The newcomer's feet bit deeply into the debris and rubble strewn ground, holding his position between Tetsuya and his target.

A second later, another man in similar combat fatigues but wearing a long white do-rag over his hair alighted on a broken wooden support beam, his arms crossed. There was a confident, menacing aura to that one, and the Kazuo saw yet another young solider, this time wearing a blue _hakama _over his pants and what looked almost like a kendo outfit. As if to accentuate that image, this soldier wielded a sword in his right hand. All three men exuded the powerful mental and spiritual force that marked them as martial artists and fighters.

"What...?" Kazuo took a few steps back, watching Tetsuya closely for another attack. "Who are...?"

"Stay back, Mr. Kuonji, or we will not be able to guarantee your safety," the one in front of him said. Then, that soldier's attention focused entirely on the threatening persona that still stood in the middle of what used to be a prosperous Osaka restaurant.

"Ryouga...kun..." Tetsuya's eyes flashed a vibrant green and he bore his teeth, the trademark Hibiki canines. "When were you ever in a position to guarantee another's safety? Hmm? My Son?"

The young man ignored the question.

"Hibiki Tetsuya," he said, his voice strained. "You know who sent me here. You know what I represent! My forces have you surrounded! Surrender now and you will be given the best possible treatment!"

"Ryouga-kun," the older man chided in the unmistakable tone of a father to his son. "You know I can't possibly comply with that demand. You're a grown man, now. Do... what you feel is appropriate."

And then, with a howl of anger and despair, it began.

-----

So ends chapter 12.

**I'd like to quickly note as an authors addendum here:**  
First: while I'd been toying with the notion of ki conceptualization in my fics for some time, what spurred this interpretation was a scene from Honour and Pride:Book II The Eight Phases by Beer-monster, which I advise everyone to go and check out. It is a truly awesome fic with some incredibly well executed fight scenes and strong characterizations.

Second: Kuonji related stuff. Yes, for those unclear of the fact, the realization Ukyou had was that her family style was developed less to defend oneself, and more to defend one's customers. There don't seem to have been many takes on Ukyou's style of fighting, or on her family, but I tried to portray both in a somewhat unique and positive light. I hoped to show her father as a good man who, despite having good intentions and a lot of love for his daughter, falls into the typical martial arts parent trap of not necessarily thinking things through. Which is why he tried to marry Ukyou off to Ranma at such a young age and have her train with a shady character like Genma. Much like the rest of the main cast, he sees the world through rose tinted martial arts glasses.


	37. What the Dead Think I

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. Newly drafted into XCOM, the Nerima Wrecking Crew struggle both to fulfill their new obligations to defend humanity, and to put an end to their own personal rivalries and infighting. The duel between Ukyou and Konatsu is over, but the fight between Ryouga, India Squad and his possessed father has only just begun amid the ruins of the Kounji Okonomiyaki Restaurant, and the ki blasted streets of Osaka.

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia**  
Chapter XIII  
_What the Dead Think_

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

11/24/06 to 11/25/06

What is XCOM?

Despite everything that I've done today, and everything I've seen today, for some reason my mother's words echo over and over in my mind. I used to record my thoughts during the day, back when I wandered by myself, and then burn the paper in the campfire that night. Looking back, a lot of it was just aimless, wistful thinking, so if this entry drags on longer than normal, I suppose I'm past due. But I shouldn't get ahead of things.

Yesterday, for the first time in several years, I saw my father.

* * *

"Why… why won't you just die…? I don't… don't understand…"

Tetsuya sighed in response to the somewhat ridiculous question as he stood amid the beaten but breathing bodies of his opponents. Shaking the sleeve of his coat, he felt the last few pieces of cloth fall back into place and sew back up. He was unhurt, and most of the other men were just unconscious, so there wasn't any real harm done there. But the man on his knees in front of him, the one cradling his ruined right hand, wasn't as fortunate. He'd made the mistake of trying to use a handgun to compensate for the failure of his techniques, and now his index and middle fingers were lying on the ground, having been blown off at the knuckles.

"You fucking monster… my hand is… my hand is…"

"Yeah, I'm sorry about that," Tetsuya said, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Mitsuko getting back on her feet, shaking off the last few cords of rope, and trying to untie the gag around her mouth. A part of him really preferred the often noisy and boisterous girl with it on. She was the kind of tomboy his father had always warned him about, which (in a way) was also part of her charm… sometimes.

"Sorry," he continued, bowing his head slightly. "But you did attack me and kidnap my fellow student here. How about we just call things even?"

Mitsuko yelled a muffled curse that promised more pain for the men who had jumped her and tied her up for the last few hours, and Tetsuya turned to try and calm her down. She wasn't really much of a fighter, having only learned a little karate to keep in touch with her Japanese roots, but when sufficiently provoked (a very subjective thing indeed) it was like her strength tripled. Obviously living in the United States for so long had brought out her more violent impulses.

"Even?" The other man spat out the word, and Tetsuya kept a close eye on him for any further trouble.

"I don't pretend to condone what my father did to your family, to your people," Tetsuya said, hoping his honest regret and empathy would finally reach this man who seemed so consumed by hatred and revenge. "I can't imagine what it was like for you. But you had no right to come here and attack innocent people just because they were my friends. When you did that, you lost whatever moral high ground you once had."

For a few seconds, the beaten man scrunched his eyes together, and Tetsuya allowed himself to entertain the notion that maybe, finally, things would be settled without the need for more fighting. One of the reasons he'd come to America was to get away from the Hibiki Legacy in Japan, and the endless fights there. America was supposed to be someplace better, where the seeds of peace were taking root among the younger generation. He wasn't like his father. He didn't like to fight, didn't enjoy hurting people, and he never wanted to take another's life. No one had that right.

Then, the man's eyes opened, overflowing with fear and anger.

"Since that first day we met, you talked about justice, and right and wrong…" With his bloody right hand, the man reached into his leather jacket and unclipped something. As he brought it out, he covered it partially with his left hand. Only when it was too late did Tetsuya realize what it was.

A pineapple grenade, with the clip already pulled.

"I don't care about right or wrong!" The man proclaimed, lips drawn back in a mad smile. "Revenge is its own justification!"

* * *

Tetsuya looked into his son's eyes, and saw that same mixture of fear and anger.

"Why," he wondered, "Had life come to this?"

He had never been a model father. He had never really been there for his son, but he had tried to be, despite the family curse. Though he didn't know his son that well, he did love him, and given the limitations of their condition he had honestly tried to give Ryouga every advantage he could. Really, he knew why life had come to this, and he knew that some of the blame lay on his shoulders.

As for where the rest of the blame lay… that was no longer in his hands.

'Shall I test his skills as well?' he thought, and something distant answered – something deep, and dark, and timeless. Something that had watched when man landed on the Moon, that had listened when the first radio was tested, that had seen when a handful of tiny ships crossed the Atlantic, and when the Great Pyramids first began to take form.

NO

'The others, then?'

NO

'Kuonji?'

NO

'What would you have me do?'

KILL THEM

And that, sadly, was that.

It began with a roar. Ryouga charged, the _ki_ charged bandanna in his hand skidding along the edge of his father's razor edged cloth ribbon in a spray of sparks. To his right, another young man – the name and known abilities quickly filled his mind - began to slash his arms, creating a flurry of vacuum blades headed in his direction. To his left, yet another young man began to charge, his sword out in front of him in a thrusting motion. A half dozen police officers were also on the scene while others evacuated shocked civilians, and he could see men dropping out of the back of a black riot control van.

A few months ago, a situation like this would've been trouble…

There was no need to test anyone here or learn from their abilities. Sure enough, the Voice assured him that he was free to use both his own abilities, and his enhancements. Jumping wasn't an option. They had obviously gotten into position for this simultaneous attack, and that sort of tactic would be both expected and anticipated. No: he would let them come, and show them exactly what they were up against. Maybe then they would be able to beat him the next time around, when he didn't have orders to so much as survive.

The Voice could make him comply, but it would never make him compliant.

Kuno was the slowest, and also projected to be the weakest of the trio by far. Ryu's vacuum blades came first. Their trajectory was not difficult to discern, and at his beckoning, long ribbon like strips of navy blue cloth tore from his coat, and lanced out in the Kumon boy's direction. They intercepted the blades, scattering them like broken glass, and forcing Ryu had to desperately jump back to avoid being filleted like a fish. He ducked and back flipped through the wreckage of the back of Kuonji's restaurant, narrowly escaping unscathed as he twirled over a stone countertop that quickly became sliced to pieces. Ryu skidded on one hand and looked up, just as three razor sharp tips of iron cloth stopped just a foot from his face.

Tetsuya noted that the Kumon fighter had been faster than expected, and more agile. Now he knew the effective limit of the _Zantetsuiichou _or Iron Killing Clothes, as well. It was somewhat unfortunate, but hardly the end of the world. He turned his attention back to the matter at hand. Ryouga was in close now, but he knew not to fight his father head on. He slid instead, aiming to clip Tetsuya's feet out from under him.

The older man took a step towards his son, pulled back his right hand, and slammed the palm of it down into Ryouga's guarded chest. The ground beneath Tetsuya's son buckled and cracked. The force of the blow broke even the concrete foundations beneath the store, causing them to rise up and stick out at an angle that, not coincidentally, sent Tetsuya into the air. He crossed his arms, and mentally retracted the icon killing cloth he'd sent in a pre-planned path after Ryu.

"You won't escape, restaurant destroying knave!" The swordsman of the group yelled from below, and he leapt up into the air with a grunt of effort. To Tetsuya's surprise, the sword in his hand began to glow. It looked like Kuno was about to unleash something interesting… when he began to fall back down to earth.

"CURSES!" Kuno yelled upwards, his jump quite plainly not up to his expectations. Behind him, Ryouga flipped out of the crater he'd made in the ground, his body wrapped in a black and green glow. Tetsuya could clearly see the particles of _ki _moving from his son's abdomen, up to his chest, down his arms, and into his hands. He knew what was coming.

Ryouga took a step out of the way to make sure Kuno wasn't in his line of fire, and then he unleashed a two handed _shishi hokoudan_ without so much as a cry of warning. The black ball of willpower shot from his fingers like a round from an artillery piece, kicking up dust behind him and shaking the ground under his feet from the recoil. The front of it burned red, as if from friction with the air. It was definitely going more than two times the speed of sound, and Tetsuya knew there was no way to dodge it, even if he was on the ground.

Still, he knew where it was aimed, and he quickly moved his right hand to cover his heart. There was only a foot of clearance between his chest and the back of his hand, and with his elbow sticking out it wasn't the kind of angle where he'd get much muscle power to cushion the impact. However, all these problems were ultimately irrelevant. His son would see, first hand, the power of the perfected _Hibikiken_ – the ultimate defensive technique.

The _shishi hokoudan_ hit Tetsuya's open palm with the force of a runaway eighteen-wheeler… and bounced back. On the ground, whatever Ryouga's reaction may have been, Tetsuya couldn't see it. He and Kuno both disappeared in a cloud of kicked up ash, dust, and dried batter shortly after Ryouga's own _ki_ blast plowed into him, sending the leader of India Squad flying across the street and into a parked police car. The Toyota absorbed the blow as the engine crumpled like tin foil. Ryoga bounced off from the impact, flying through the air, while the car spun in a circle, losing both right side wheels.

Tetsuya alighted softly on a broken table.

His son's _shishi hokoudans_ had gotten… more intense, it seemed.

"DON'T MOVE!" Tetsuya felt a tingle run up his spine. It was rare to encounter verbal _ki _maneuvers, but he already knew of this one, and easily shook off the paralysis effect. He turned slightly even as Ryu drew back his right leg and crossed his arms in preparation for the _Moko Kaimon Ha_ technique. It was still a wise choice in attack: sweep the enemy's arms away and strike their center. Had Tetsuya not known that little bit about it, from the memories torn out of Ryouga's mind many weeks ago aboard an alien craft, then he would have likely actually been hit by it.

Instead, he stepped into Ryu's attack vector, and held out his right hand, lightly interposing it with the _Yamasenken_ Master's. Too late to hold back, Ryu's right hand impacted Tetsuya's palm, and the force was instantly reflected, sending his whole body twisting to the left. Tetsuya then struck with his left fist, hitting Ryu clean in the kidneys, and sending the younger fighter back stumbling back. It was to his credit that he was even still conscious.

Tetsuya didn't bother congratulating him. He snap kicked him in the belly, literally beating the breath out of Ryu's lungs. Following that, a roundhouse kick opened Ryu's lower lip in a shower of red and sent him spinning like a rag doll through the air. No sooner had Tetsuya lowered his left leg then the sound of gunshots filled the air. Of course, before the sound reached his ears, his hands were already a blur of motion in front of his body, moving in response to his _sakkijutu_ in a fan like motion across his torso and covering his vulnerable face.

Police officers screamed in surprise and fear as their own bullets found their mark in their comrades, or even themselves. Out of the six, all but two fell to the ground, dead or incapacitated. Those shots not reflected by the _Hibikiken_ flattened against his coat. What a waste it was for them even to be here and participating. Behind the downed officers, the riot squad had already launched two canisters of tear gas that arched lazily (to Tetsuya's senses, at least) through the air.

A small part of him was annoyed that they hadn't even shouted a warning or asked for him to surrender. He supposed the poor sods had standing orders to shoot to kill if negotiations between the two Hibikis broke down. Their handguns were worthless against him, but the rifles that the riot squad carried could be annoying if he was distracted, and the tear gas would always be an irritant.

Taking a linear step, he must have seemed to teleport to the remaining police officers. One second he was in the middle of the ruined restaurant, and the next he was over by the parked police cars. Slipping a foot under the nearest vehicle, Tetsuya flipped it several feet into the air, heading towards three of the riot police who had been crouched with their rifles, getting ready to take a shot. They turned in surprise to see the underside of a compact car heading in their direction, and yelled. Only one kept the wits to even try and get away, not that he was fast enough.

A second before they would have been crushed, a massive spatula embedded in the ground near them. The blunt end of it managed to catch one of the more solid surfaces under the vehicle, and stop half its descent just short of killing the men. Running up, Kounji Kazuo quickly pulled two of the stunned officers out of danger, while the third scrambled out of the shadow of the propped up car.

Tetsuya bared his teeth. He had been told to kill everyone present, and that included these policemen. He was about to step in directly, when he saw a flash of silver: it was that weak swordsman's blade. Responding to his thoughts, a strip of cloth rose up off his shoulder to intercept the blow. Tetsuya had fought many weapons users in the past, unfortunately, and his Iron Killing Clothes had never failed to make short work of both them and their tools.

It was around that thought that Kuno's sword cut clean through his ribbon of Iron Killing Cloth. Feeling a surge of panic, Tetsuya pivoted, and jumped back. A rip in his coat formed midway between his shoulder and elbow, on his left arm. Less than a second later, the cloth there began to stain red. Tetsuya could barely believe it. This… boy had cut him.

He hadn't been cut in… in… decades!

"Behold, my Tenrai Hououken!" The swordsman boldly announced, holding his sword before him. "I am Tatewaki Kuno, Rising Star and Proud Blue Thunder of UNETCO! I hereby challenge…"

Tetsuya snarled while the boy ranted, and shot a ribbon of cloth out to his right, spearing another car like a piece of meat in a shish kabob. Amazingly, the ribbon lifted the vehicle clean into the air, and a second later, introduced it to Kuno's face. The Blue Thunder skidded across the street, and Tetsuya ran in his direction, aiming to bring the grill of the car down on his prone form. Before he could, however, three vacuum blades hit the Toyota, and it subsequently went up like a fireball.

That wasn't his only problem, either, as Ryouga lunged with his own Iron Cloth sword. The lost boy kept his strikes fast, but not with a great deal of force, making a response with the _Hibikiken_ less attractive. Tetsuya dodged a slash aimed for his eyes, and responded by releasing two ribbons of cloth from his coat. He was wary of attacking with too many, because they were both his offense (in ribbon form) and defense (when wrapped around his body). Ryouga was no pure swordsman, however, and Tetsuya had to intercept a kick to his upper leg, and spin into an attempted backhand. The lost boy stepped out of range of the blow, and tried to grab his father's wrist.

"Dokuja Tanketsu Sho!" Ryu jumped into the fray, leading with a flat palmed spear strike. Tetsuya turned, and deflected the powerful blow to his back, taking advantage of the instantly stiffening properties of his _Zantetsuiichou_. Still, he'd felt it, which meant it must've been a very potent strike under normal conditions. If Ryu tried it again, he'd be sure to reflect it with the Echoing Fist.

The distraction, however, allowed Ryouga to move in and slide his left arm in and behind Tetsuya's. With a practiced motion, the lost boy stepped back with his left foot, the sole of his shoe smoking from friction as it ran across the asphalt. The pivoting motion provided ample momentum, and Tetsuya felt his left leg painfully impact Ryouga's right one before he hit the ground. As he brought his hand up to block the strike to his left ear, Tetsuya wondered when his son had picked up Chinese martial arts techniques.

Still, it wasn't enough.

Before he hit the ground, he tucked in his legs, and pushed up with his right arm, having planted his hand on the ground. Much like his son had done in a duel with a certain pigtailed fighter, more than two years ago - Tetsuya launched himself into the air with the strength of just one arm. To his surprise, while Ryouga regained his footing, the Ryu boy reached behind him and brought out some sort of weapon. It looked a little like a gun, but surely the young man had to know that it was pointless to use something like that against him.

Tetsuya covered his face as Ryu fired, but the bullets were all aimed for his left shoulder. Sure enough, they hit the Iron Killing Cloth there, but rather than flattening or deflecting like normal bullets, they shattered. A sharp smelling mist assaulted Tetsuya's sense of taste and burned his nose, and a second later, his eyes watered.

"Now!" Ryu yelled, but Tetsuya wasn't sure to whom.

Then bullets hit his body, and the Hibiki elder quickly caught the gist of what sort of situation he was in. Gritting his teeth, he activated his final layer of defense as he spun through the air. When he landed, a shell of white covered his head and his hands. Rifle caliber bullets slammed into him, but to no obvious effect. He staggered back a few steps before raising his arms slightly.

"That's it," Tetsuya heard his son say. "The full _Zantetsuiichou_."

Behind the iron cloth armor, Tetsuya huffed. Didn't Ryouga know it was rude to talk so blithely about another's secret techniques, at least out loud? The full _Zantetsuiichou_, unlike the partial version, was really only for emergencies. He wore an undershirt, of course, in addition to his blue coat. This could be used to form a layer of reactive armor around his vulnerable head and hands. The cloth could also filter his air, and narrow slits provided adequate vision.

The only draw back… was that he couldn't use the _Hibikiken_ like this.

"Cease fire!" Ryu yelled. He and Ryouga nodded to each other, and charged right towards their target, the latter jumping into the air for a flying kick, and the latter aiming low. Did they really think it prudent to engage him in melee? He almost wanted to reprimand them.

He had just pulled the white cloth back from his right hand, to use the _Hibikiken_ against Ryu's flying kick, when Ryouga jabbed his hand into the ground. A shower of debris bounced harmlessly off Tetsuya's armor, but at the same time a cloud of dust made it all but impossible to see.

Tetsuya tried to back away and get out of the smokescreen, when the first few blows came. He had always known that Ryouga was strong (surviving to the prime of his life as a particularly directionless Hibiki), but the Ryu boy was no slouch either. Behind his Iron Killing Cloth, Tetsuya was able to shrug off most of the blows, but he could only negate so much blunt force kinetic energy with his _ki_. Eventually, he would run out, and his _Zantetsuiichou_ would fall apart.

Suddenly, a burning sensation cut into Tetsuya's thoughts, forcing him to yelp and wave his arms to ward off whatever attack that had been. He caught his son ducking under a swipe, his right hand trailing red smoke.

"What the hell…?"

In a split second, the elder Hibiki condensed everything he had experienced about the attack; including the damage it had done to the Iron Killing Cloth around his midriff (amazing – it would have taken an oxyacetylene blowtorch to singe him through his cloth armor). Instantly, that information was relayed to other formerly human minds, and then back to him. One of them was certain that it had been a derivative of the _bakusai tenketsu_ called the _seirensho tenketsu_, but none of that family of techniques should have worked against his Iron Killing Cloth. If it was a variant, it was a surprising and unanticipated one. Thoughts bounced back and forth, and came to the conclusion that this was something new.

And his orders changed.

Spreading his arms wide, Tetsuya's blue coat suddenly exploded into a dozen strips of cloth, circling around him and then shooting out in every direction. Ryouga and Ryu tried to dodge the attacks, but then the former noticed one of the ribbons shooting past them and towards the riot police and Ukyou's father. With his left hand, Ryouga grabbed that ribbon and twisted his wrist, wrapping it securely around his hand. The ends cut deeply into his skin, but he ignored the pain and pulled it close, keeping it from reaching its targets.

"Ryu!" Ryouga growled, blood trailing down his arm. "Do it!"

"Kaichu Hoju Satsu!"

Even before the order was given, Ryu had been in counterattack mode, using the _Yamasenken_'s In-the-Pocket Round Hug Death. Ryu was strong, physically stronger than anyone in the two Squads save Ryouga himself, and on par with Tetsuya in that respect. Even with his arms immobilized, the elder Hibiki had already begun to use his knees to punish Ryu's midsection. A ribbon of cloth snaked back, coiled, and pointed right at Ryu's face.

It was been on the verge of striking, when a checkered bandanna hit it from the side, giving Ryu the opportunity to lean back, bridge his spine, and perform an inverted suplex on his opponent. Tetsuya's vision momentarily turned black, as the crown of his head became planted several inches in the ground. Even without being able to see, however, he could sense that his son was moving in for a follow up attack. His legs were still free, and he kicked forward, and felt it hit Ryouga's palm.

Launching another strike, to keep the younger Hibiki at bay, he bent his hands inward at the wrist, and drove his palms into Ryu's lower body, just above the pelvic bone. Ryu hissed in pain, and the second his hold wavered given the agony he was under and the unusual position of his body, Tetsuya broke free. Lifting his head out of the impression it had made in the street, he kicked back and forward, splitting his legs and hitting both boys, one in the sternum and the other in the crotch. Flipping back onto his feet, Tetsuya smirked and craned his neck left and right, working the kinks out of his abused skeletal system.

"Huh! You two kids sure are a lot of trouble!" Tetsuya remarked, as the ribbons of cloth retracted… save one, which was still in Ryouga's left hand. Still smiling, he kicked back and down, planting his foot first on the side of Ryu's face, and then stomping down on his younger man's chest with enough force to crack the ground beneath him. The Kumon heir spit up blood and instinctively tried to curl into a fetal ball. Ryu would've suffered worse in the form of another blow to the head, but Ryouga roared and pulled his left arm back, sending his father flying towards him.

The father and son clashed in a flurry of strikes and counterstrikes, the latter aiming to avoid the former's palm, and a resulting Echoing Fist, while striking at his wrists and joints. Tetsuya, on the other hand, was free to attack with not just his fists, feet, knees and elbows, but lancing ribbons of razor sharp cloth as well. Ryouga had mindfully wrapped a bandanna around his right hand, and used the back of it to deflect a bolt of cloth that would have otherwise taken out his right eye. He then tried for a leg sweep, and switched into an inverted scissor kick that Tetsuya easily blocked.

Ryouga has always stressed brute strength in his fighting style, overpowering and outlasting his opponents, rather than relying on finesse or an opening. He was a lot like his Grandfather in that respect. Tetsuya's own style of fighting was defensive in nature, and even at a young age, had never appealed to his son. Still, Ryouga's strength was incredible, and his skill was top notch, though he only bothered to block or dodge the most deadly attacks sent his way.

Tetsuya caught sight of a car behind them, and he spun around, burying a fist in the engine and lifting it clean off the street. Swinging it at his son like a giant fly swatter, Tetsuya's smile grew as the young man blocked it with his left arm. Ryouga then stepped in and struck at his father's wrist with his right hand, causing him to lose his grip. Treating the one and a half ton vehicle like any other weapon, Ryouga gripped the frame firmly, and leaned forward, slamming the front of it into his father's face.

Tetsuya tasted blood in his mouth, but kept the presence of mind to lean back and flatten his body as Ryouga spun the car through the air that he had just occupied. He then rolled to the side and out of the way as the four door sedan came back around, low and in the opposite direction, scraping against the ground with a fountain of sparks and a metallic screech.

If not hitting his opponent with such a massive makeshift weapon frustrated the lost boy, he didn't show it, as he lifted the entire vehicle over his head, spun it a hundred and eighty degrees, took two steps forward, and brought it back down. The back of the car deformed against the ground as Tetsuya again barely moved out of the way, once, twice, and a third time. Now, finally, Ryouga began to become frustrated, and with a savage roar he jumped into the air (with the crumpled car still in his hands), and brought it down with all the acceleration gravity could provide.

Tetsuya chuckled, and held out his hand.

Even something this large (so long as it hit his palm before any other part of his body) could be reflected with the _Hibikiken_. For good measure, he not only reflected the kinetic energy of the object, but also pushed up with his own strength, magnifying it. The car crumpled, buckled, and tore itself into pieces. The engine and most of the chassis erupted into the air, flying twenty or even thirty feet into the sky. What was left in Ryouga's hands, he quickly discarded as he kept flying forward, his heel coming down in the form of a descending axe kick.

With his free left hand, Tetsuya prepared to use another _Hibikiken _against the attack, when he saw Ryouga's hands fill with bandannas. No less than four of them shot out like shuriken, forcing the elder Hibiki to decide what he could and couldn't defeat. Still, in a game of chicken with his son, how could he possibly back down?

He let the bandannas hit, one cutting even through the Iron Killing Cloth of his left shoulder, and another slicing open his right cheek as he moved his head just enough to avoid worse damage. Then Ryouga's heel kick hit his left palm, and the lost boy went tumbling head over heels, crashing into and through a concrete telephone pole that subsequently demolished another store, and set another on fire due to the fallen electrical cables.

Then, the gunfire came back, but more sporadic than he'd expected. Raising his cloth defenses, he felt around with his _ki_ for the two missing riot police. He finally caught sight of them crouched on the top of a building behind some railing. With a snarl, he stomped down on the front of another car, using it as a bullet shield, and held out his left arm. Most of the time his Iron Killing Cloth responded to thought, but when he wanted that extra bit of power, he had to devote his full concentration to it. Instantly, two long strips of blue cloth shot out, and cut into the building a floor below the roof, destroying supports and cutting through steel like it was warm butter.

A second later, the whole thing collapsed, taking the two would be snipers with it.

"Vile fiend! Face the power of Tatewaki Kuno, if you dare!"

"Oh? You're still alive?" Tetsuya turned to his right, and saw the kendoist back on his feet and brandishing his sword. Behind him, Ryu was again up and looking to keep fighting, despite one eye being so swollen it likely made him half blind. These boys were tenacious, that was for sure. Still, it was nice that his son had made some friends his own age. Like any father, he sometimes worried…

"A pleasure to meet you," he addressed the swordsman, and pointed with his right hand. "Kuno-san."

A dozen filaments of blue cloth tore free from the arm and body of Tetsuya's coat. Even a superb swordsman could only block so many strikes, and if more than one attack were to land or approach at the exact same instant of time, then one would always get through. No matter how fast a person was, one weapon could only be in one place at one time. Kuno seemed to realize this as well, but he nonetheless stood his ground, ruined vehicles and burning buildings to his left and right. As the dozen fabric spears closed in on him, he set his stance, and lowered his blade for an upwards slash.

"Kokuzan!"  
(Sky Arc Decapitation!)

With that cry, Kuno swept his sword up, and in its wake a circular distortion in the air lingered. The ribbons that hit it either bounced off, or where themselves cut. Seeing his technique succeed, Kuno smiled and was on the verge of announcing to the world the proof of his greatness, when the ground at his feet cracked open. His eyes widened as two bands of blue shot up, wrapped around his legs, and pulled him under.

"That takes care of that…" Tetsuya turned to Ryu. "Now for you."

"Damnit…!" Ryu spat, a wad of blood and saliva splattering on the ground. He gathered his _ki_, and began to pivot. "Kumon Style! Sai Dai Kyuu Kijin Raishu Dan!"

'First-Rate Demon God Assault Bomb?' Tetsuya wondered. The name was nice, and so was he technique, but it was useless as well. As far as _ki_ based projectiles went, vacuum blades were slow – less than mach speed even. Ryu suddenly began to spin, vacuum blades shooting off from his legs and arms.

"Well, well, that is a lot of them!" Tetsuya marveled, but still had little trouble blocking the first twenty blades that saturated the area around him. They devastated everything else nearby, however, cutting other telephone poles in half, and tearing up the street. A few others just flew off into the distance, going wild.

Wait…

Tetsuya quickly extended a cushion of Iron Killing Cloth behind him, and sure enough, a few seconds later, a half dozen of the vacuum blades that had 'gone wild' came back, like boomerangs. It was a nice little trick, and if it had gone as planned, he could have actually been hurt. Not a bad bit of work; these kids were pretty good. Better than he was at their age. In fact, they were better than anyone he knew, for their age.

But Ryu couldn't keep it up forever, and he began to wind down after the boomeranging vacuum blades failed to produce any results. As he came to a stop, breathing heavily, he fell to one knee, accumulated injuries catching up to him. More blood pooled in his mouth, and he spat it up so it covered his lower jaw. Tetsuya resolved himself to end the young man's life quickly, and painlessly.

He was about to do so, when he saw someone else approaching.

"This must be that Bakusai Tenketsu training I heard about paying off, am I right?" Tetsuya asked, facing his son who had just now returned to the field.

"I'm going to end this, right here… right now!" Ryouga picked up his pace, stepping now back into the street. Tetsuya just watched him. His _ki_ reserves were far from bottomless, but he was confident that he could pick apart these three boys with minimal danger. They were good, yes, but not in his league… not with the knowledge and enhancements his Masters had rammed down his throat.

"You will?" Tetsuya asked, amiably. "How?"

Ryouga didn't answer, but he did start to collect his _ki_ for something big.

His father, meanwhile, cocked his head to the side. "Before you 'end things' … I've been told to tell you something: 'That girl… is alive."


	38. What the Dead Think II

The lost boy's ki wavered, but quickly reformed.

"Tell them they shouldn't say the same lie twice," Ryouga replied with a scowl.

"It isn't a lie, apparently," Tetsuya explained. "Akari is her name, right? She's alive… in a way. Her body is gone, but her memories, her mind, those things are still locked up safe and sound. Her experience in breeding unusual livestock was considered worthwhile to archive. She can be brought back, too. Put in a new body. You can be with her again."

Ryouga ground his teeth together, grief and anger molding his features. "What… what did they do to her?"

"Well, that's a bit of a long story," Tetsuya replied with a smile. "Are you sure you want to know, son? Lower your mental defenses. Just a little will do; you can bring them back up whenever you want. It's a small price to pay for peace of mind, isn't it?"

"Lieutenant!" Ryu yelled, interrupting whatever the lost boy could have, or would have, said in response. Tetsuya looked from his son, to the other young man, and huffed dismissively.

"Ryu!" Ryouga suddenly cried and made a quick circular motion with his right hand.

"Right!" The Kumon heir straightened up and reached behind him. "Kinshi Kinbakusho!"

In a split second, Tetsuya felt something thin but unexpectedly strong pin his arms to his sides. The Gold Cord Tight Binding Soar technique normally worked with more conventional rope, but properly treated corded wire worked just as well. Even before the cords had fully tightened around him, razor edged ribbons of cloth were already cutting him loose. It was then that Ryouga announced his technique.

"Perfect… Shishi Hokoudan…"

Tetsuya knew the mechanics behind the technique, but still stared in amazement to see it for himself. All the emotive energy in his son's body rushed out in a great wave, but rather than letting it exit his body omnidirectionally, he managed to project it upwards. There was a blast of heavy _ki_, too, which saturated the area and kept him further pinned down. Nearby metal parking meters distorted from the crushing force of Ryouga's depressive _ki_, and the ground began to crack from the pressure.

Then, when the last of his emotional energy left his body, leaving him completely empty, he dumped it all upwards, into the sky. It took a full second, a very long time as far as most _ki_ attacks go, for the energy to accumulate into a ball, a thousand feet in the air. It hung there for another full second, like a green and black moon, eclipsing the sun and a swath of the mid day sky. Then, in the third second, it began to distort, turning from spherical to an oval to oblong, and then it fell like the wrath of God. Tetsuya, his arms pinned and unable to move, looked up and opened his mouth.

His hands weren't the only place he could form an Echoing Fist.

As the Perfect _shishi hokoudan_ accelerated towards the Earth, it seemed to stop just a handful of feet from the ground. The sudden halt in momentum released a rush of hurricane force wind that knocked men off their feet and tore the doors off the front of nearby buildings. In the center of it all, Hibiki Tetsuya stood, and as his voice changed from a low tenor to an echoing base, the massive ball of _ki _launched skywards, twice as high as before.

And then the cords around his arms broke, and he lifted his arms triumphantly.

Facing his shocked son, he casually remarked, "I'm being told that your shishi hokoudan grows more destructive the higher it falls from. I'd say it's about a half a mile up there, right now. What do you suppose Osaka will look like after that comes back down?"

Father and son glared at one another, and Ryouga lifted his hand to the sky.

Closing his fist, his reply was simply:

"Shishi Hokoudan: Fukahi Soutou."  
(Lion Roar Shot: Unavoidable Annihilation)

And, four thousand feet in the air, a single meteor sized ball of _ki_ shattered like an exploding star. The sky lit up with a hundred black stars, all of which began to fall back to Earth. Protective cloth wound down Tetsuya's arms, layering itself not just once, but twice. He started to back off, to get moving, when the first ten stars converged on his position, punching craters or holes into the ground. He tried to dodge, as twenty came in the next wave, destroying everything around him, and batting him around like a puppet with its strings cut.

The barrage continued, even after that, following him as he skidded down the street. The next wave must have been forty of the black _shishi hokoudans_, because it seemed almost as if the weight of the world had fallen down on him, and the building behind him disappeared beneath a shockwave of splinters and smashed masonry. For the first time in recent memory, he blacked out, despite the near absolute defense of his Iron Killing Cloth armor.

The Voice, however, would not let him rest.

His eyes opened, and he pulled himself out of the rubble that entombed him. His armor still held, but… but it was at the breaking point. As he struggled to orient himself, a fist like a runaway train slammed into his lower jaw. The force spun him around almost completely, and flecks of white Iron Killing Cloth began to flake away, revealing his jaw line. Another blow buried into his lower torso, and then what must've been a knee hit his other side twice. He tried to raise an arm, but he was just a moment too slow, and another blow to the other side of his face left him seeing stars.

More and more bits of overstressed Iron Killing Cloth wafted through the air, but he wasn't finished yet. He saw Ryouga, and he blocked the next blow, responding with an open palm strike to his son's nose. The lost boy had left himself exposed, and had been made to pay for it. The younger Hibiki staggered back as blood filled his vision. Tetsuya tried to summon the energy to form a ribbon of killing cloth, but in his beaten state, all it did was break away from his coat and disintegrate. The two watched each other, caught their breaths, and then stepped forward to continue the fight.

The last of Tetsuya's facial armor broke away as his son landed a hammer blow behind his right ear. A retaliatory strike to Ryouga's left side further broke a rib, eliciting a howl of pain. Regarding his son, his opponent, Tetsuya managed a weak smile.

"You've gotten pretty good, son…" he managed to say between breaths. "Your grandfather would be proud of you. You've surpassed the old me… the real me."

Ryouga snorted blood out of his broken nose, a disgusting sound that at least kept it from flowing down his throat. Without concern, he spat a bloody wad of the stuff to the side.

"I don't care what the dead think," he snarled, working himself into a deeper frenzy that would keep his body from giving out entirely. It was hardly a secret that Ryouga Hibiki ran on rage and desperation, and when those things failed him, his drive rapidly transformed into indecision. Now, here, his eyes were bright, shining with an inner hate filled fire that Tetsuya had seen only a few times before. They were both possessed, in their own ways.

It was just a relief that Mitsuko wasn't here to see this.

"Revenge," the son hissed. "I can live on just that much. Even if I become a monster. Even if I throw everything else away!"

Tetsuya nodded. "I understand. You've always been that way. You take after your grandfather, and I've come to accept that. You're too old for me to lecture you. However…"

In his mind's eye, Tetsuya saw his son as a boy, his fists bloody.

"Sometimes it's so hard to hold back…" his son had all but cried, all those years ago. "When will I be able to use my full strength, father?"

"Only you can determine when the time is right, Ryouga," he had explained patiently to the hot headed young boy. "Remember: martial arts is the expression of one's virtues, it is not a virtue in and of itself. What are you fighting for? Is it worth hurting others for? Is it worth dying for? Is it worth killing for? Answer that, and you'll know how to apply all you've learned."

"However," he said, back in the present, just as he had then. "I would prefer you don't do anything that makes your mother cry."

Ryouga swayed slightly at that, remembering those words. Tetsuya could see the change in his eyes. The younger Hibiki's mouth moved almost imperceptibly, though whether uttering a silent curse, or an expression of regret, his father couldn't tell.

"What you said about her…" Ryouga finally said, and his voice little more than a whisper. "I want… I want to… to know why. Why didn't they do to me what they did to you?"

Tetsuya knew, and the Voice didn't tell him to keep quiet about it, so he spoke freely.

"They are not all knowing," he tried to explain, as a father often did, and in some way put his son's mind at ease. "Your memories gave them a vague idea what to look for, but not many details. They wanted to be sure. They didn't want to take chances. The chance that one of the others could determine that something had invaded your mind, and in that way to put them on guard to the nature of the threat, was too much of a risk. It also seemed, at the time, that there was nothing to get from you that they couldn't get from the others. They were wrong on both accounts, in retrospect."

Ryouga briefly closed his eyes, and the expression he wore made Tetsuya's still human heart break. Tragedy and misfortune often went hand in hand with the Hibiki name, and the Hibiki curse, but grief was not something he was accustomed to seeing on his son's face. The father looked to his left, hearing approaching footsteps, and saw one of Ryouga's teammates picking through the debris and rubble – it was the sword wielding boy, and the third member of their squad was right behind him.

"I… miss Akari so much," Ryouga spoke up, and in his hands, Tetsuya saw a stun rod, cracking with electrical fire. "Father, I want those things in your head to hear me when I say this: Akari Unryu, the woman I loved, is dead. I don't care what they did with her body, what they did with her memories. I don't care if they can bring her back. She's dead. And I'll raise a mountain of corpses in hell to atone for letting that happen."

"What the wanderer says echoes the sentiment in all our hearts," Kuno added in, planting his sword in the ground and taking out a small stun baton of his own. "These creatures are to be brought to justice. I, Tatewaki Kuno, will not willingly keep company with cowards or those who would put aside righteous duty for pleasure, even that of reunited love."

Ryu just snapped his hand out, another stun rod at the ready.

Inside Tetsuya's head, the Voice was disappointed. It wanted to know if he could escape. He could try, his mind responded without prompting to the alien query, but it was unlikely. He let out a deep breath, and looked up at the dispassionate sky.

"Mitsuko…" he whispered, and then India Squad was around him, and for once, even the Voice had nothing more to say. There was sharp, biting pain, and then silence.

* * *

Miles away, riding in a train, Cologne finished washing her hands and walked out of the bathroom, smiling cordially to the woman who had been waiting outside the door for her turn to use the facilities. Her new acquaintances had been a little too thorough in giving her a new, vital young body. A "monthly appointment" was not something she had altogether missed over the last sixty odd years.

Still, it was only momentary, they assured her. In time, she and the other chosen few, like Trenchard himself, would be elevated above the inhabitants of this backwater farm world. Human beings were not like Mutons, Floaters, or the other lesser races. A select few were capable of so much more, and she was foremost among that tiny and select group. In a cosmic or even simply stellar perspective, loyalty to anything but the quality of the mind was so… so embarrassingly bucolic and anachronistic.

Her companion was still in the same position in which she had left him: sitting with his legs crossed (in a "manly" fashion, her old amazon mind noted, with legs crossing perpendicular), and reading the day's issue of the Tokyo Tribune. He was perfectly relaxed, even though the Society of Sirius had suggested they avoid public transportation. Things would only get more troublesome now. Their "new faces" wouldn't be quite so new and inconspicuous once UNETCO got accurate pictures of them out to local authorities.

"Looks like Hibiki-san's been taken alive," the man noted, almost as if he had read that fact in the paper he was holding. "'I don't care if they can bring her back?' What a hard headed student that boy must have been."

"They both were," Cologne said, and retrieved a cell phone from the pocket of her western business style pants before sitting down next to the man. The phone wasn't to make a call, but to check the time. "But that's also the quality that sets them apart from all the other youngsters I've dealt with over the last fifty years. This ploy didn't work, but I don't think we have to give up yet."

"That really isn't up to us, is it?" the man asked with a shrug. "It would be wasteful to lose them, but losing more of our fellows to them is equally inefficient. Ah, see? You hear that? Looks like after we deal with Happosai, we're going to be recalled."

Cologne just shook her head sadly, and put the phone away.

**They** had talked about it, and the **Mind **had intervened. Now there was nothing more that could be done about it. Cologne wasn't so much broken up about the Tendo clan – as far as she knew, none of them were worthy of enlightenment, plus they had been a pain in the ass in the past – but her great granddaughter was a possibility, and her son-in-law, Mousse, Ryouga could all make excellent Trenchards. They were good boys, even that troublesome Mousse, and their addition was worth a few risks. Perhaps they would listen to her in person, and see the greatness that could be in their future, and the truth of their extra-terrestrial benefactors? Some company would be nice amongst a sea of stars.

Otherwise, they would all die beneath the smoking ruins of Seiran Mountain.

And wouldn't that be a pity?

* * *

"What are these things made of?!" Hibiki Mitsuko cried; struggling to get out of the chains she'd been wrapped up in quite thoroughly. "There's no give to them at all!"

Mousse landed nearby, looking more aggravated than physically exhausted.

"That is sort of the point," he deadpanned, standing up and adjusting his glasses. "You're not supposed to be able to just break out of chains with brute strength."

"That's true," Mitsuko admitted. "But these things are flimsy! Can't be more than a couple centimeters thick."

"Now, maybe… finally… you'll listen to me." Mousse pivoted to the side as a brick flew past him, missing by inches. Followed by another. And another. And two more.

"STOP IT!" he yelled, snatching one of the bricks out of the air. Mistsuko paused, the dainty toes of her left foot gripping another brick that had been torn out of its place in a broken wall nearby and about to toss it. For a second, neither of them moved, and then Mousse had to bat another brick thrown at his face out of the air.

Mistsuko laughed sharply. "Don't underestimate me just because I'm tied up and I can't use my arms!"

"I'm not," Mousse interrupted.

"Oh," she said back. For a few seconds, neither thought of anything to say.

"Look," Mousse finally got back on topic. "I really do work with your son, with Ryouga. We're friends even. Mostly. I'm pretty sure we're friends."

Mitsuko stared at him intently.

"I don't know…" she ventured. "You don't look like that Saotome boy."

"I'm not that Saotome boy!" Mousse replied, (ironically) insulted by being mistaken for someone else.

"You're Watanabe Tobi?"

"Yes! No!" Mousse shook his head in frustration. "That's just the name on my badge!"

Mitsuko raised a delicate eyebrow.

"I told you that was my name expecting you'd cooperate. My real name is Mu Tzu," Mousse explained, crossing his arms and hiding his hands in his sleeves. "Sound familiar?"

Ryouga's mother blinked.

"No," she answered, much to his chagrin. "And what kind of name is 'Mousse' anyway?! Why is your name a hair product?"

Mousse didn't really have a good answer to that, so he had to settle for:

"Just because…and its Mu Tzu, not 'mousse!'"

Mrs. Hibiki, despite being tied up in chains that could probably derail a train before they break, didn't seem particularly worried about her situation. Adopting the sort of tone one uses to address a child caught in the telling of an obvious falsehood, she put his claim to the ultimate test.

"If you were really my son's friend, you'd know what his favorite color is!" she declared confidently. "So what is it, hmmm?"

"Like I'd know what his favorite color is!" Mousse grumbled, rolling his eyes. "What kind of question is that? Do you know what his favorite color is?"

Mitsuko thought about it for a second.

"Yellow?" she wondered aloud. "Black? Yellow and black!"

"How could you not know, and expect me to? Are you really his mother?" Mousse remarked, just loud enough for her to hear. She frowned at that, and after a few silent seconds, he could tell that, for the first time, he'd made her angry. It wasn't the kind of pound-you-into-the-ground angry he was used to either, from the typical troupe of over-violent Nerima girls or the Amazon crowd. Hell, that sort of response would have suited what he'd thought Ryouga's mother to be like. After all, the lost boy's temper was like a supervolcano about to explode.

Instead, Mrs. Hibiki just quietly turned away to look out over the roof.

"What do you want from me, anyway?" she asked, her tone of voice no longer as light and amicable as it had been before. Mousse sighed; it seemed he'd picked up some of Ranma's foot-in-mouth disease.

"You and your husband need to be taken into protective custody. There is reason to believe you're in danger otherwise. Your son, Ryouga, sent me personally to get you, and he'll explain everything in more detail once we're somewhere secure," Mousse said, watching her carefully in case she tried to jump to another rooftop. When she didn't reply, he continued, "Are you going to come with me, Hibiki-san, or are we going to keep fighting?"

He watched as she struggled a bit more, almost half-heartedly, knowing full well that she wouldn't be able to break free. Even Ryouga couldn't, not from those chains, made as they were of alien alloys. Physically stressing them into failure was all but impossible, and even the breaking point didn't work on the exotic metal.

Then, in the distance, a black and green pillar of _ki_ instantly seized both martial artists' _sakkijutsu_. Like all _ki_, it had a distinctive flavor and feel to it, even from far away, which both recognized instantly. Mitsuko tensed, as if to try and run in that direction, but then seemed to think better of it. Mousse was thankful for that. Chasing a Hibiki around town was something he'd hoped to avoid, and she seemed to realize she'd probably get lost on the way there.

"Alright," she relented, finally. "Let's see what trouble we're in now."


	39. Special: Know Your Foe!

**The Road to Cydonia**

**Special Database Entry:** "_Know Your Enemy!"_

The group of aliens often referred to as "The Visitors" are comprised of numerous species. While many of these individual species are specialized towards certain missions and objectives, they are not married to them, and so any alien can be found performing any role, though some excel at certain duties more than others. How the aliens interact across species lines is not well understood, however their society seems to be both strictly structured in its hierarchy, and devoid of conflict. While the aliens are all individuals, they are all directly or indirectly part of a communal Groupthink or higher consciousness, which is either a function of their desires as a whole, or is a part of a separate intelligence that motivates and coordinates their activities.

The five primary alien species are:  
Sectoids, Floaters, Snakemen, Mutons and Ethereals

Beneath them are the non-sentient or servant races:  
Chryssalids, Reapers, Celatids, and Silacoids

And lastly, two weapons platforms/constructs:  
Cyberdisks and Sectopods

For now, let's look at the four primary alien species!

**Species:** _Sectoid_  
**Function:** Research & Exploration  
**Reproduction: **Artificial  
**Average Height:** 3 - 4 feet  
**Average Weight:** 60 lbs  
**Average Psi-strength:** Class 8 Baseline Human 5  
**Average Intelligence:** Class 8 Baseline Human 5  
**Average Life Span:** 180 years

**Overview:**

Commonly referred to as "Grays," Sectoids were the first alien race encountered, and remain the most common. They operate according to a strict hierarchy determined by psionic power, and while their society has been described as "hive like" the analogy is not entirely appropriate. No natural reproduction occurs at all among the Sectoid race, they have no Queen or anything of the sort. Sectoids instead focus their energies on "improved replications" and gradual improvements on each cloned generation.

They specialize in the more sophisticated research-based abduction of human beings and mutilation of cattle, but are quite capable in combat as well. Soldier class Sectoids are far more aggressive than their higher ranked cousins, which prefer to lie in wait or psionically attack from a distance. Sectoids are not physically strong or hardy, and while their excellent eyesight and steady aim make them deadly snipers, they fare poorly in close combat or intense firefights as their stamina and endurance are poor.

**Physiology:**

Sectoid physiology is remarkably simple compared to that or naturally evolved creatures. The digestive system is largely vestigial, and capable of only digesting a special liquid soup of specific proteins and nutrients. Some Sectoids have internal fluid-filled membranes that allow them to function in an airless environment; however, on Earth, they breathe oxygen normally. The structure of the lungs, along with the webbed flat feet and hands suggest aquatic origins. There are no reproductive organs. The brain and eyes are very well developed, including natural _ampullae psionic_ and _corona lucis_ attached to the _spinocerebellum_ and _cerebrocerebellum_ respectively. The small mouth and nose are non-functional, and there is little to no sense of smell.

There is little physical or cosmetic variation between different Sectoids, but human-Sectoids hybrids are known to exist in several forms. Some are engineered to be almost entirely human in appearance, and have been used to infiltrate human societies and organizations. Most are the result of alien research and are visibly more alien than human. It is believed that a very small percentage of the human population has some Sectoid-derived or inserted DNA in them as a result of decades of alien experimentation.

**Misc:**

Despite a near non-existent sense of taste, Sectoids seem to enjoy creamed corn and have been observed trying to eat corn on the cob, usually unsuccessfully. Due to the surprisingly primitive Sectoid nervous system, their sense of pain is more similar to that of a fish than a human. Like most aliens, Sectoids have excellent night vision. They are just barely able to "see" into the Near Infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum, but are near color blind when it comes to the blue to purple region. Virtually all Sectoids seem to be addicted to psionic stimulation of the pleasure centers of their brains.

**Species:** _Floater_  
**Function:** Exploration & Harvesting  
**Reproduction: **Sexual/Artificial  
**Average Height:** 5 - 6 feet  
**Average Weight:** 180 lbs  
**Average Psi-strength: **Class 3 Baseline Human 5  
**Average Intelligence:** Class 4 Baseline Human 5  
**Average Life Span:** 50 years

**Overview:**

The second alien race encountered by XCOM, Floaters appear to be the scouts and workers of the alien invasion. The vast majority seem to be clones, but there are at least a few distinct "races" within the Floater community with cosmetic and functional differences. Floaters, like Mutons, are naturally sexually reproductive creatures, but lose that ability due to surgery. Floaters organize themselves to conform to the overall alien hierarchy, with each Floater being "tailored" for a general task, like navigator or medic or Commander. They then hold this post for life. Floaters do the bidding of more powerful and influential aliens like Sectoids and Ethereals.

Floaters are most commonly encountered during the more routine sorts of abduction or harvesting missions, where the goal is specimen collection and harvesting rather than delicate experimentation. If the Sectoids are researchers, the Floaters are butchers. They are also often used for the construction of alien bases, for supplying those bases, and (earlier in the war) as Terror agents. They have no psionic ability and weak psi strength in general, but are physically robust and can survive unaided on Earth indefinitely (most aliens can only survive breathing Earth's atmosphere for a few days).

**Physiology:**

Floaters are humanoid in appearance, and are believed to have evolved from amphibian-like creatures. Their skin, almost always a shade of purple in color, is highly porous and constantly covered in a mucus-like secretion that serves to isolate it from the outside atmosphere, defeat 'alien' (in this case Earthly) bacteria and other foreign life forms, and that quickly covers and seals wounds. There is evidence of genetic engineering regarding their muscular and skeletal systems, and the lungs are very well developed. The unblinking eyes are similar to those of a cat; the rod photoreceptors are saturated with metarhodopsin, giving Floaters effective nightvision capability.

The brain is not as large as our own, and while Floaters can see very well, their hearing is poor, as is their sense of touch. The jaw, lined by sharp teeth, is functional. Internally, Floaters are most notably characterized by a single large cybernetic enhancement made to their bodies. All active duty Floaters have a large implant replacing their lower body and part of their torso, which (aside from providing flight through anti-gravity technology) takes over the functions of the heart, lungs, renal, exocrine, endocrine and digestive systems. All of these organs are generally removed (only the lungs are left on occasion, probably as a backup in case of system failure). This life support system allows the Floater to survive in very hostile environments.

**Misc:**

Despite a naturally predatory nature, Floaters are not naturally accustomed to or comfortable with flight or open spaces, and these conditions usually make them cautious. In doors, they are more aggressive and prone to pursuit. Floaters often display a pronounced dislike of human beings, and seem to revel in acts of cruelty and viciousness when given the opportunity. Floaters typically ingest the same liquid soup as the Sectoids, but can eat normal foodstuffs in captivity (showing a marked preference for small saltwater fish).

**Species:** _Snakemen_  
**Function:** Military & Terrorist  
**Reproduction: **Asexual  
**Average Height:** 6 feet  
**Average Weight:** 230 lbs  
**Average Psi-strength: **Class 4 Baseline Human 5  
**Average Intelligence:** Class 5 Baseline Human 5  
**Average Life Span:** 80 years

**Overview:**

Snakemen are notorious as Terror agents, primarily due to their partnership with the parasitic Chryssalid organism. Snakemen have undergone far less genetic modification than Floaters or Sectoids, and even retain their original reproductive system. Snakemen are organized into a rigid military hierarchy, but interrogations have revealed that (unlike with most other aliens), individual Snakemen can advance in rank through distinction and effort. Most command rank Snakemen are much older than those of soldier rank. "Officers" among the Snakemen seem to value the lives of themselves and their subordinates more than most aliens, and will fall back if they take heavy casualties or deem an attack to be unfavorably risky. They have been seen rallying their comrades and even going out of their way to protect Snakeman Navigators and Engineers.

They specialize in military style operations and incursions of all types. Reports of Snakemen involved in abduction or harvesting operations are essentially unknown. They frequently man important alien bases, and are the backbone of most modern terror ops. Snakeman behavior is difficult to generalize, as it varies depending on the commanding officer. Snakemen of Command rank answer directly to the Ethereals, and there is some speculation that they may be "mercenaries" of a sort. They do not have psionic attack abilities, but they do have some natural and artificial psi defenses, including a cybernetic version of the _corona lucis_. They are the only aliens to protect themselves with personal armor.

**Physiology:**

Snakemen seem to have evolved in a very hostile environment – perhaps a desert planet. Their body is designed to survive extreme temperature variation, and they are very tough and resilient, capable of surviving extreme trauma. Immediately noticeable is the large snake-like foot or underbelly that begins midway into the torso region (there is a small gap in the ribs at this point). This muscular foot allows the alien to use lateral undulation or rectilinear locomotion to propel itself in any direction. Unusually, the muscular system in Snakemen is part of the powerful cardio-vascular system, and uses a hydraulic principle to create movement. The heart is the only "true" muscle.

Snakemen are rather heavy set, with strong bones and thick layers of muscle and interlaced sinew. There are generally very few (or no) cybernetic implants. The reproductive system is always intact and functional, and each asexual Snakeman carries up to fifty unfertilized eggs at a time. Reproduction takes place through parthenogenesis. Actual embryo growth is very fast, on the order of four months from conception to birth, after which the new Snakeman reaches sexual maturity in roughly two years. Snakemen also seem to have the ability to start or stop the development of embryos within them.

**Misc:**

Snakemen, like all aliens, seem to rely heavily on liquid "alien food" chambers to survive, and have a marked disdain for earth based foodstuffs. Snakeman hearing, sight, taste and touch all seem to be at around human level, though their sense of smell is worse. Like many earth-snakes, Snakemen have special pits that allow them to "visibly" distinguish ambient heat sources. Snakemen communicate through a series of hisses, clicks, and ultrasonic sounds – XCOM finished translating around 90 of this language in 2004. Snakeman armor, worn around the upper torso, shoulders and (occasionally) the arms is made of layered alien alloys, and is resistant to all forms of weapons fire. In space or other near-vacuum environments (like Mars), it is believed that Snakemen wear respirators to survive. Snakemen have been called the "medium infantry" of the alien incursion.

**Species:** _Muton_  
**Function:** Military  
**Reproduction: **Sexual/Artificial  
**Average Height:** 6 to 7 feet  
**Average Weight:** 380 lbs  
**Average Psi-strength: **Class 3 Baseline Human 5  
**Average Intelligence:** Class 5 Baseline Human 5  
**Average Life Span:** 90 years

**Overview:**

Mutons are the Ethereals' preferred heavy assault soldiers and enforcers. These humanoid creatures are genetically engineered and cybernetically enhanced for a life of warfare: soldiering and piloting for their masters. They are perpetually in the thrall of the Ethereals, and can not survive without constant psionic contact with that terrible race. Their organization is rigid and inflexible, with each Muton filling out the role it is given without hesitation or uncertainty. While they often display an ample individual understanding of tactics, the low value their masters have of their castrated lives (and their natural toughness) means they will often expose themselves to unnecessary danger.

Like the Snakemen, Mutons specialize in military style operations, but generally not Terror raids. They are tasked to guard alien bases, pilot heavy alien craft (like essential supply ships or battleships), lead assaults, or occasionally reinforce the ranks of weaker alien races. Their lack of interest in Terror Missions is highlighted by their poor compliment of "shock troops" – Celatids and Silacoids, like Reapers, are poor performers compared to Chryssalids, Sectopods or Cyberdisks. Like Floaters, Mutons have been sterilized by the Ethreals, but are (in a natural state) capable of sexual reproduction. Mutons encountered by XCOM have been exclusively male.

**Physiology:**

Mutons are massive creatures, towering over most all humans, and outweighing them substantially. Their bones are incredibly dense, as are their muscles, making them naturally very strong, if not particularly fast in anything but a sprint. Their intelligence is believed to be at human level. The senses (except touch) are all enhanced cybernetically, providing pinpoint hearing and excellent smell. The eyes are tetrachromatic (four dimensional color vision, extended into the UV range) and extremely sensitive, with cybernetically added anti-polarization abilities.

The cardiovascular system is also enhanced to provide dramatically improved endurance. The heart is insulated against electric shock, and the immune system is supplanted by artificial "smart prions" that ignore native proteins but attack foreign ones, like unexpected viruses, bacteria or even chemicals. This and other enhancements allow Mutons to remain effective even under adverse NBC (nuclear/biological/chemical) conditions. These also make Muton blood and flesh lethally toxic. Lastly, and most obviously, an organic armor is grafted onto the bodies of all Mutons. This flexible organic armor, which includes a thin alien alloy mesh, is extremely tough and resistant to all forms of weaponry, especially kinetic or piercing impact. Projectile weaponry is all but useless against Mutons.

**Misc:**

Mutons can subsist on typical liquid alien nutrient soups for a time, but are not designed for it, and generally must consume large quantities of raw flesh. Mutons seem to prefer mammalian flesh, and pork in particular. All Mutons have a sort of failsafe system, not fully understood, that causes their nervous systems to shut down without periodic contact with their masters, the Ethereals. This means that captured Mutons generally die before they can be properly interrogated, and attempts to simulate the Ethereal "reset" ability with captured Ethereals or human Psi-ops have all failed. Because of Ethereal manipulation, Mutons (especially the lower ranked ones) are surprisingly compliant and non-resisting against mental attacks and psionic domination. This is their one Achilles' Heel.

**Species:** _Ethereal_  
**Function:** Research & Command  
**Reproduction: **Sexual/Artificial  
**Average Height:** 5 - 6 feet  
**Average Weight:** 80 lbs  
**Average Psi-strength: **Class 10 Baseline Human 5  
**Average Intelligence:** Class (?) Baseline Human 5  
**Average Life Span:** (?)

**Overview:**

Ethereals are the commanders, or at least overseers, of all alien activities in the Solar System. Mysterious and powerful, they only appear on Earth under dire circumstances or to carry out critical missions. Like the Sectoids, their organization is a hierarchy based on psionic power. However, unlike the Sectoids, the Ethereal hierarchy seems to be fluid, as individuals aspire to become more influential and powerful. All Ethereals, however, are dominant over all other races of alien, if only by virtue of their unmatched psionic power.

The goals of the Ethereals are unclear, and it is believed they are still subordinate to the overriding alien Groupthink or higher intelligence that coordinates their activities. Ethereals can be encountered performing almost any task (occasionally as an individual overseeing lesser alien species) if it is deigned to be important to them or their goals. Because of their mental powers, they are considered the most dangerous of the alien species, but also the most valuable for interrogation. Regardless, in any mission where an Ethereal is present, it becomes the priority target by default. Typically, Ethereals prefer to lie in wait or behind cover, using their mental powers to weaken their foes or turn them against each other.

**Physiology:**

Physically, an Ethereal resembles a desiccated corpse more than a living, breathing life form. Their bodies are frail and physically retarded – the muscles are often atrophied to the point where they can not move their limbs by themselves, and most of the internal organs are withered or necrotic from disuse. The sensory organs, or what used to be them, are likewise shriveled and no longer functional. Even the heart is weak, and the lungs barely function. The sex organs are functional, but minimally so, indicating that actual gestation and growth are handled artificially.

Only the brain survives. The vast majority of blood in the body goes to the brain, and it is large and well developed (though actually smaller, mass-wise, and the Sectoid brain). Like the Sectoid, the Ethereal has a naturally occurring _ampullae psionic_ and _corona lucis_ attached to the _spinocerebellum_ and _cerebrocerebellum_; both are large and allow the creature access to its formidable psionic powers. It is these powers that allow the Ethereal to survive, even in the vacuum of space, as well as sense its environment. Ethereals are telepathically and telekinetically powerful, to the extent that they can animate their own frail bodies; giving themselves strength exceeding that of even the mighty Muton, and flight through the air. These powers also provide defense, telekinetically slowing or stopping bullets, partially redirecting or deflecting explosions or even weakening plasma bolts. Needless to say, physical trauma to the limbs or torso rarely bothers Ethereals, so long as their brain remains intact.

**Misc:**

Ethereals do not seem to need to eat, and in captivity they are known to uniformly refuse all attempts at providing sustenance. If kept unconscious for long periods of time, they can "starve" to death, implying that they use their powers in lieu of normal food. Ethereals wear a sort of cloak over their bodies, typically some shade of orange or rust-red, with minor cosmetic differences between individuals. The cloak is not entirely for show, however, as it is a simplex metallic weave that hardens on contact, providing excellent protection as well. Ethereals have been known to use their telekinetic ability to cause brain damage in another target, particularly during a psionic duel. Unlike with Sectoids, all Ethereals are capable of psionic projection, regardless of rank. Ethereals are somewhat vulnerable to electric shock.


	40. XCOM UFO Defense I

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars.

Hibiki Tetsuya has been defeated and captured; India Squad returns to Seiran Mountain triumphant. However, the wounds of a battle pitting father against son are slow to heal, and a family long estranged begins to come together on uneasy terms. The rest of the Wrecking Crew find some relaxation between missions, but a new mission looms to test their moral and physical resolve.

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia**  
Chapter XIV  
_XCOM - UFO Defense_

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

"Man is a reed, the weakest thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed, and from that comes all his dignity."  
- Pascal, Pensées

* * *

What's going on? 

Who are these people?

What is XCOM?

That was what she asked me, my mother that is, after she had been cleared by psi-ops to know the basics of what a web she had become entangled in. At the time, I'd first thought about repeating the old mission statement we'd all been shown. That XCOM was "the best and brightest, united in purpose and organization, dedicated to ensuring the survival, dignity, and freedom of the human race and the planet Earth." But that sort of thing sounds better on a logo or in a presentation than in the real world.

* * *

Akane watched as he woke up, and put on her most charming smile for her friend. His current state reminded her too much of the last time she had seen him on a medical bed, back at Dr. Tofu's. Back then he had been frantic, half awake and half asleep, but in the end enough drugs had sedated him. Now, here, he was much more composed and calm, but at the same time, he seemed almost… less human, too. 

Ryouga's eyes moved over her, and he didn't move, except to close them.

Akane's smile started to fade. Almost as long as she had known him, he had always been shy, a little goofy, and always happy just to be around her. He was the best male friend she had, but lately, something inside him had changed. Both towards her, and towards the world. He was polite enough, but seldom very nice. The way he had acted before, when she and Ukyou had asked for his help training, wasn't the aberration – he was always like that now. Naturally taciturn, he spoke more, but really only when it was necessary to settle or stifle more idle conversation.

Ranma had told her about Akari, so she knew he was hurting inside, but truth be told, she had no idea what to do about it. He was her friend, but she really hardly knew him. He'd never talked much about himself over the years, and the time they'd spent together had generally been her talking and him listening, or both of them just sitting in comfortable and amicable silence. Now the silence between them was… disheartening.

He lifted himself up off the bed without a word, and examined his right arm. A long trail of stitches ran down from the outside of the wrist almost to the elbow. It was a clean but somewhat gruesome wound, but she knew it would heal in time, probably with only a faint scar. His hands, however, were un-bandaged, and she could see the crisscross pattern cut into the volar region of the palm, and the insides of the fingers. They had obviously been cleaned by the doctor, but still some of the flesh looked almost ragged as she stared at it.

She licked her lips, finding them suddenly very dry, and tried to say something, but the words never developed. He seemed intent on counting the stitches used on his arms and torso. He even reached behind him and felt the work done on his back – there were no stitches there, but a patch of artificial skin covered and sealed a laceration beneath his left shoulder blade.

A little selfishly, she silently admired how he looked. He'd have hated to hear it, but he had Ranma's body – generally rather lithe and slim, but with surprisingly well developed muscle underneath. Ranma had once explained that he looked that way, and not overly muscular, because of the thickness of his skin and because of his training. Both boys looked like they weighed around seventy kilograms, when both were in fact around a hundred. Ryouga, however, had many more faint scars and hints of old wounds than Ranma. _Ki_ enhanced healing covered them up very well, but as a fellow martial artist, she recognized them easily enough.

He was methodical in his self-examination, and acted like she wasn't even there, an unusual reaction that annoyed her… and worried her, too. He wasn't even blushing like he always did when he, or a girl nearby, were in a state of partial undress. She thought a few times about interrupting him, and a few times about leaving, but in the end she just waited. Done making sure he was in one piece; he remained upright, but let his arms fall to his side to help prop him up.

"Akane-san," he said after a few seconds more of silence. It was what he always called her, but without the inflection in the second syllable she was more used to. There was little eagerness to it, like he didn't even want her there.

"Please," he continued, "Turn around. I would like to get dressed."

"Oh!" she blushed, forgetting that he was naked from the waist down as well. She turned around on the stool she had been occupying with a metallic squeak, and waited. His clothes were hanging nearby, next to a blue medical frock and scrubs. The base medical facility prided itself on quick turnaround, and achieving "patient mobility" as soon as possible. Where a normal hospital would have kept someone in bed for days, here they were patched up in the most efficient and advanced fashion, and encouraged to resume their normal duties as soon as possible.

Staring at a wall of plain blue curtain, she resolved herself. She'd seen Nabiki and Kasumi talking with him, and he hardly knew them! She was probably one of the best friends he had, or so she had always thought (Ranma was the other in that equation, and they seemed to be enemies as often as they were friends – it was a strange dynamic, regardless), and he had always been there for her. Yes, they were friends! They could exchange more than a few sentences, especially before anyone else interrupted.

"So, Ryouga-kun, how are you?" she asked. It was a nice safe question to break the ice. Oddly, she found it easier to broach the subject of conversation without looking at him. That only made his change of behavior more obvious. This way, she could pretend almost like nothing had changed at all.

"Fine," he answered, curtly, from behind her. He didn't seem inclined to say anymore, when he added, "My squad isn't here, are they?"

"They're all training right now, I think," Akane replied, glad to be able to give him a straight answer. She'd seen them down by the practice range. She was about to add that she was sure they'd come and check on him in a little while, but he cut her off.

"Good," he said, simply. Only a few more seconds passed, and then: "You can turn around now if you want."

Akane did. Ryouga sat on the edge of the medical bed, his dress pants and an unbuttoned white shirt on, putting on his socks. She could sense instantly that he planned to get dressed as quickly as possible, tell her "thanks for visiting," and like a machine, head off to bury his melancholy in work. And it was important work, too, she knew that – so what good was there in getting in his way? This was why she was here. This was why seeing him was so disheartening.

She felt powerless.

He had always been there before to make her feel good, even when surrounded by people stronger and faster and more skilled than herself. Now he didn't seem to care, now, when she desperately wanted him to. Her relationship with Ranma was coming around, or so she assumed, but she wanted a friend. She wanted her Ryouga back.

"Please talk to me, Ryouga-kun," she said, and watched the effect it had on him. He paused in slipping his right foot into one of his shoes, and if he had just left off were he stopped, she wouldn't have known what to say or do. But he stopped, and slowly slid his foot back out of the black footwear.

He turned his head and smiled at her. "Do you need help with something, Akane-san?"

Another person, like Shampoo, probably even Ukyou, would have been fooled by the false smile and the friendly tone of voice. Akane knew what he was like when he was happy, when he was glad to be around to help her, and this wasn't it. It was like she was Nabiki, and he was glad to help her with something out of simple courtesy and out of a desire to avoid trouble.

A clock on the wall nearby ticked forward, louder than expected in the silence that ran between them. His eyes lingered on her for a second, looking for something, but then he turned away when he saw she wasn't buying his act.

"I'm worried about you, Ryouga-kun," Akane said, hoping to get through to him. "A lot of us are, but me especially. Didn't I tell you: that we're friends? Friends forever."

"Friends… forever…" he closed his eyes, resting his chin on his chest. "Yes. I remember."

"Friends, even stubborn guys like you, talk to each other when they have a problem." Akane scooted closer to him. "You were always there to listen to me, and I don't think… I don't think I've always been there to hear your problems. But I'd like to be."

If anything, he screwed his eyes even tighter shut.

"Ryouga-kun…"

"Akane-san," he said, finally. "The only things I could say are ones you wouldn't want to hear. Please ask me for something… or leave me alone."

Akane recoiled as if struck. 'Leave me alone' were the last words she had ever expected to hear from him, at least when directed at her. She shook her head in denial. A part of her, naturally, was getting angry at him. She wasn't used to be talked to, talked at, like that. She had a short fuse, especially when it came to boys, and she knew it. But drowning out the small surge of anger was a tide of empathy. She couldn't let it just end like that. She couldn't!

"I can't," she replied, resolute. "I won't! You're behaving strangely… you're not yourself…!"

He shook his head at that, like it was some kind of sick, sad joke.

"If you won't talk to me about it…" Akane searched for some kind of threat, something that would work. "I'll get Dr. Phillips to…"

He faced her then, eyes open. He stood up, and so did she, her body acting almost on instinct. Her back bumped into something cold and metallic, but she barely noticed it, as he seemed to loom over her. His arms reached out, resting palm-first against the wall behind her, and she felt instantly trapped, like a rabbit in a snare, staring at a fox.

"Akane-san…Listen to me," he told her, slowly. "I'm going somewhere. Somewhere you wouldn't want to follow, and wouldn't want to know about. And if I stop walking towards it, if I stop moving, I'll sink straight into the ground and die. I don't want to talk about it. Not with you, and not with that quack psychiatrist. Pretend I'm off on another trip and forget about whatever trouble I might be in."

He seemed to regret phrasing things that way, and his expression softened. "I really would like to be your friend, Akane-san, even though I don't deserve it… but I can't let you stop me from moving forward."

By the time she caught her breath, a blink of an eye later, he was back at the hospital bed, putting on his shoes. Akane composed herself, rubbed her eyes, and stood between him and the door.

"You're acting like an idiot," she snapped, her normally stentorian angry tone of voice unusually subdued. "Don't you ever want to be anything except angry? Anything but bitter? You can't live like this!"

His shoelaces tied, Ryouga finished buttoning up his shirt, and silently threaded a plain black tie around the neck of his shirt.

"I know about Akari, about how it happened," Akane persisted, after his lack of a response. "And I'm sorry. We've all lost people we knew, but you lost someone you loved. I know it hurts, but don't be like this. I know you'd be happy to help me, you already have with my training, but the one who really needs help is you. You, Ryouga-kun!"

For a second, she thought Ryouga was going to explode, in either depression or anger, but he simply shrugged, and deftly prepared his tie to just the right length. He was composed, but behind his eyes, she could see him screaming. Deep down, she could tell he wanted someone to confide in, someone to cry in front of, but that he felt it would be a betrayal of her – of Akari. Didn't he understand? Moving on with life didn't mean you valued the past, and those lost relationships, any less.

"You're probably right," he admitted, with disturbing calmness. "But I can't fight my way to the stars with depression. They won't let me. But anger. Hatred. They don't have as much of a problem with those things. To live with myself…"

He closed his eyes, and when they reopened, whatever she had seen behind them was gone.

"I have to keep moving. I don't have time to stop and smell flowers with you," he said, walking up to her, and gently moved her aside.

She hadn't wanted to move, but his words – she could understand what he meant. His superiors wouldn't let a depressed, near-suicidal man go out and fight. But a man hardened by hatred of the enemy, with a strong will to live, eager to please and do anything asked of him… they'd overlook the wrongness in favor of what was expedient.

"As I stood at the edge of a pit of despair, you once told me… 'Let's be friends. Let's be friends forever.' I've done bad things you'll hopefully never hear about, and I'm going to do more that are even worse. I am a knife, looking for someone to sink into. If you still want to be my friend, please accept that about me."

Ryouga opened the door and stepped through the threshold. Not surprisingly, faithful Shirokuro was waiting there patiently for her master.

"Thank you for the visit," he concluded, predictably, not even looking over his shoulder at her. "And for your concern… Akane-san."

* * *

What I told her was that XCOM was a wall around the world, a defense against the invaders from the stars. It was our only defense, our only hope, without which every man, woman and child would be left naked and exposed to alien depredation. That was more along the line of thinking that I wanted to impress on her. XCOM was vital to the defense of the world, and so whatever I had done, or would do, had to be seen in that light and with that justification. 

Grandfather had his war, and I now have mine. That was a parallel she could easily understand. Not only a war – but a just war. No cause could be more just than the defense of humanity from a ruthless and remorseless inhuman foe.

* * *

Commander Noriko Yasuda understood hate. 

She understood what it was like to feel powerless in the face of alien power.

She had been twenty three when they had first come for her. Her abductions had been what would eventually be dryly categorized as "Class Four," which meant genomic and genetic experimentation. For a long time, she had ascribed the nightmares and occasional sickness to a poor diet, to stress, to too much TV… When she had come to realize the terrible truth, she had kept it a secret, ashamed to even admit she believed in such an outlandish thing as malignant extraterrestrials.

Besides, what could she do to stop it?

Chance and fate had conspired to give her an opportunity very few in her position would ever have. She was not the only abductee in UNETCO, but she was (to her knowledge) the highest ranked. More than six years ago, she had been a young police officer in Okinawa, the young wife of an American pilot. They had been married for less than a year when UNETCO had petitioned for his reassignment. He had come highly recommended by his superiors, and the organization was in need of the best pilots the world had to offer.

So he had disappeared ("Just some light test piloting," he had told her at the time), and a few months later, she had been told that she was to be relocated. Later, she learned the truth: very early in the war, the aliens and their human thralls had picked up on the strategy of using information picked from the minds of front line soldiers to determine their civilian identity. The families of several soldiers had been kidnapped, and UNETCO had decided to invest in most closely guarding and protecting the direct relatives of all front line operatives, including pilots. There were no "sanctuary communities" built at that time, so she had been allowed to stay on base.

There, confronted by the truth, her worst fears about her prior abductions had been confirmed. Determined to be useful, Noriko had tried to volunteer for combat duty herself, working every day to reach the high standards all XCOM soldiers had to meet or exceed. Then, during a desperate interception attempt against an alien Terror Ship, her husband had been shot down. They had not been together for very long, but the grief of losing him had almost broken her. The only thing that had kept her going was the cause, and the hatred that burned in her for revenge.

Every day, battling exhaustion and her own limits, she worked to become accepted as a soldier. When she had achieved that, and became the first XCOM soldier not drawn from the military, Noriko set her sights higher. Even after being wounded, she had bulled through weeks of physical therapy (plasma burns then being new and unconquered medical territory) and gotten back on the front lines. She was the second woman in UNETCO to advance to the rank of Lieutenant, and the first to make Captain. Commander Barrett had jumped ahead in their little competition and made Colonel and then Commander first, after the Rio Turkey Shoot, and the Irhil M'Goun reassignment, but Noriko didn't mind.

Barrett was a penny pincher, and known for being fiscally conservative, while Noriko knew she was seen as a more aggressive risk taker, happier spending money on guns and bombs than research and development. Still, she'd been happy enough commanding assaults against the hated alien foe in person, rather than managing things from behind a desk. It took a while, but she'd made more than a few friends in high places, and when the previous Colonel of Seiran had died in a mental duel with an Ethereal (always a risky prospect), she got the promotion. Six months later, the old Commander – who had built Seiran – retired after suffering from a stroke.

So it had come to be that a humble woman from Okinawa, a widow and an abductee who had lost her husband and suffered the most unforgivable of violations, now oversaw the defense of the eastern Pacific Rim from the creatures that had so wronged her. Even after so much, reading reports of how many of the alien invader had been killed still made her smile. For her, there was only one policy with regard to the enemy: zero tolerance. The aliens and those who aided them all had to be eradicated.

It was for that latter reason that she had been so eager to adopt the martial artists from Nerima. Over the years, she had brought together a superb group of combat operatives, all specialists in the art of hunting and killing aliens of all stripes. The idea of losing even one to fellow humans, misguided in their alliance with the star spawn, had always galled her and forced her to refrain from more aggressive action against the Sirius Movement. All because of Section Seven of the UNETCO Charter.

Now… things were different.

At the far end of the conference table, her two newest officers sat next to each other, listening to the background presentation they had been gathered (together with the other officers) to hear. Both had recently had their security clearance increased to Malakim/2C, the third level of clearance for strategic, tactical, and scientific information resources. They were real Lieutenants in all but name, now, and Noriko was pleased with how they were developing. Ryouga had brought in both his parents, so the Commander had no doubts about his loyalty or dedication, and while she reckoned Ranma to be the less aggressive of the two, she was sure he could be depended on; at least when it came to fighting people he didn't know.

Seiran was not as large a base as Andermatt, Wyndham, or Fry Canyon when it came to pure combat capability, but it now had ten active duty squads. All six Lieutenants, both Captains, herself and the commanding Colonels of Dongchuan and Irkutsk were in attendance, the latter two via videoconference. Captain Ben-Solomon was just finishing his report concerning the latest information gathered from numerous prisoners, both alien and ex-human. They had learned a great deal recently, and now, finally, it was time to act.

Global Command had ceded to her regional authority, and if need be, she could call on aid from as far as UNETCO Southeast Pacific (based in Australia) or UNETCO Central Asia (based in Saransk, Russia). There was to be no mention of it in this meeting, but the war was hopefully about to enter its final phase. XCOM had known for some time about the alien command center in Cydonia, on Mars, but had not understood the totality of the presence there. There had been no concrete information on what alien forces were stationed there, in what strength, or even if it was their headquarters in this star system. Two years of intense research and investigation had cleared up much of the mystery, and UNETCO Global Command was now committed to an eventual "final attack" on Cydonia, once the Earth itself was free of alien infestation.

As Captain Ben-Solomon took his seat, Commander Yasuda stood up.

"By now, all of you have little doubt about where we are headed and why," she said, looking around the room. "Most of you have already at least given a cursory look to the papers handed out when this meeting began. Let me say it anyway…"

"Right now, as we speak, there is an alien base in the northern half of the Korean peninsula, inside the Changbai Mountain Range. Together with the A-18 base in Antarctica, these are the last two alien enclaves on Earth. A week from now, both will be smoking ruins." She smiled at that, and saw her subordinates grin in return. "For too long, the presence of these bases has allowed the enemy to come and go as they please. No more. It stops now!"

Around the rectangular meeting table, she saw nods of agreement. The aliens had been quick to realize that the longer they stayed in the air, the greater their chance of being picked up on by dedicated earth based radar systems (despite their disturbingly effective stealth systems). The development of Hyperwave decoders made the transit from outer to inner atmosphere all the more unattractive for the alien invaders, so they began to sortie in force, and started construction of alien bases. From these locations on Earth, they could shorten their transit time, and dramatically lower their chance of detection, much less interception.

"You all have your assignments," Noriko continued. "You all know what must be done. You all know that our targets are not just alien… I wish things were different, but we have human enemies as well. Those in league with the invaders must be dealt with to purge their masters' taint from this world. For this, we will be relying heavily on our new squads, and their unique skills and abilities. Then, with our house, our home, once again in good order… we can move on to bigger and better things."

She then concluded with a few words of thanks, and the meeting was dismissed. Captains Ben-Solomon and Banks were already chatting eagerly as they left, discussing the up coming raid. Ranma and Ryouga followed behind their mentors, more silent and subdued. The two Lieutenants formally operating under Ben-Solomon, Tsuchihashi and Lofquist, filed out side by side, being more comfortable in each other's company than with the other two Lieutenants under Captain Banks: Stirling and Gottwald.

Eventually, she was left with just the two Colonels, communicating via teleconference. Both were her regional subordinates, responsible for running the two smaller bases in Siberia and China. Contrary to her own example, regional commanders were rarely representative of the area under their purview. Colonel Kalinowski, in charge of Irkutsk, was Polish Special Forces, and Colonel Butler, who ran Dongchuan, was a New Zealander. Both were career military in charge of primarily military bases, with little to no research or manufacturing.

Kalinowski took a puff of his cigarette, disregarding the (usually) strictly enforced no-smoking policy UNETCO had on its bases. He was a grizzled older man, and the sort who would refer to the Berlin Wall as coming down "just the other day." Noriko suspected he was still a little unhappy with her for reassigning Sergeant Karpov and two others from Irkutsk, leaving him to 'break in' their rookie replacements.

"Better things, eh? Bigger, certainly," he said, once everyone of lower rank was gone. Then he smirked. "We'll crush them."

And he logged off.

"It sounds like a good time," Colonel Butler then said, wearing a lop-sided grin. He was around Noriko's age, with a full head of brown hair and strongly Anglo-Saxon features. The little pin on his collar, in the form of the Eye of Providence, glittered in the light reflected by his nearby computer. That pin, and the PSI label barely visible under his shoulder insignia, openly boasted (or warned) of his formidable psionic powers.

"I've been waiting and wondering when we'd be making a push like this, you know!" He chuckled softly. "I'll have my boys ready to back you up. And that little surprise, too, of course."

"I'm counting on it," Noriko replied, and gave him a friendly nod before he also logged off, his conference screen going black. XCOM Colonels were often very independent minded, treating their rank as a more active duty sort of Commander that occasionally led from the front. The PSI capable ones were particularly likely to get into combat, using their abilities to better coordinate their subordinates, relay orders, and attack the enemy.

Noriko's own psi strength was, unfortunately, rather low. Which meant, as a Lieutenant Commander, her days of hands-on combat were effectively over. When the time came to attack Cydonia, she knew she wouldn't be leading the operation. Her psi-strength just wasn't enough to take the risk. Who really knew what menaces, what kind of psionic power, lay in the heart of Cydonia on Mars? Back at her office, Noriko Yasuda patted the headrest of her chair.

"This is as far as I can go, Nate…" she whispered, pressing her head to the cool leather of the chair. "I hope its enough."

Until the day humanity was free from alien terror, sitting back and organizing their defeat would have to suffice. The aliens had killed him, and so many others. Maybe then, when they were finally driven back to the burning stars that spawned them, he could rest in peace, and so could she. And here was no doubt in her mind that they would triumph, in the end.

As a victim herself, the alternative was too terrible to contemplate.


	41. XCOM UFO Defense II

* * *

And not just the alien, either. The traitors in our midst subvert and infiltrate human society in any number of insidious ways. They spy for the aliens, they kill for the aliens; they turn against their own kind… willingly. If anything, they are worse than the demons from the stars. The aliens are what they are, born or cloned into their role in life. A human who wishes to become one of them will never have my forgiveness. 

Or mercy.

* * *

"Something's bothering you." 

Ranma favored the lost boy with a frustrated look before going back to the snack machine. He was still used to the Japanese ones, with the Japanese products. These were all American type machines, with the subdued colors and unfamiliar snacks. A heated-foods machine would have been a nice change of pace after all this time. Ranma's index finger wavered over the selection, wondering how "cheesy" "extra cheesy" was. Was it too cheesy? He liked some sorts of cheese, yea, but the thought of eating a fistful of the stuff made him kinda sick in the stomach. Finally, unable to really settle on one choice, he just picked a "trail mix" package; the one with a variety of things in it all at once seemed like a fair compromise.

Retrieving the little plastic bag, he turned his back to the machine.

"Bothering me, huh?" he asked, opening the little bag that would serve as his lunch for the day. Really: a late morning meeting that went on for three hours, and then a group meeting just a few hours later at 4? It was a pain in the ass, especially since he and Ryouga had to come up with a bunch of new material at the last minute. A few things were bothering him, that was true, but the lost boy was probably referring to one in particular.

"I suppose something is," Ranma said, fishing a broken pretzel out of his trail mix. "This isn't like before. There'd be something wrong with me if I wasn't bothered by it."

Ryouga snorted, like he'd smelled something that disgusted him.

"Tell that to Saffron," the lost boy replied, taking a drink from his paper cup of water. "Did tearing him into pieces bother you, or were you too busy worrying about Akane-san?"

"That's not fair," Ranma grumbled. "I mean, come on! Akane's life was at stake! I just did what I had to."

"Even if it meant killing someone," Ryouga noted. It wasn't a question, but an (apparently) obvious statement. "This is the exact same. You don't have a life in your hands, but you're doing the right thing anyway, so what does it matter?"

"Well, Saffron was just one guy. This isn't the same, man." Ranma shook his head sadly. "These people don't…"

"Get your head out of your ass, Saotome," Ryouga growled back, cutting his friend and rival off. "We have our orders. You'll be happier if you stop thinking about the why and concentrate on the how."

"Oh, yeah, great advice! This isn't the sort of thing we signed up for and you know it!" Ranma hissed, keeping his voice low. "And what do you care how I feel about it anyway? That's my business."

"I just don't want you getting cold feet or hesitating," the lost one replied, looking at Ranma seriously. "Look, if you can't do this…"

"Just 'cause I don't like it don't mean I won't do it!"

Ryouga didn't respond to that, knowing it was true. Ranma would follow through with a plan even if he didn't like it. The Anything Goes Style made sure of that. The question was more why was he so worried about how Ranma felt about it? Both boys were saved from contemplating that when Ranma inclined his head and Ryouga looked over his shoulder to see a familiar face approaching.

"Hey! Ucchan!" Ranma greeted his old friend with a typically sunny smile.

Ryouga just grunted.

"Hi, guys," Ukyou said, waving as she got closer. There was a small transparent bandage on her cheek, and one on the side of her neck as well, along with a few slightly lighter-than-skin colored spots that were the result of spray-on-skin. What other remaining souvenirs her duel with Konatsu had left her with was obscured by her clothes: the typical white turndown-collar dress shirt and olive gray pants. Today, she had her hair down, probably in an attempt to make the small bandage on her neck less conspicuous.

"You got the email?" Ranma asked, watching as she walked over to the nearby lounge water cooler for a drink.

"The one about this meeting being mandatory attendance?" Ukyou asked, and in so doing effectively answered the question already. "Yeah. Shampoo didn't, but I told her about it at lunch."

"Good," Ranma replied, nodding in approval. It was a little thing to be happy about, Ukyou and Shampoo eating together and being civil enough to exchange important information, but he was glad for it nonetheless. Shampoo had been rather quieter since Ukyou's duel and things were going more smoothly than Ranma could remember. Konatsu and Ucchan both seemed to be much more… candid around each other, now, and more ready to work together. It was a cathartic thing, in a way, to fight with someone, and this was especially true for a martial artist.

Ranma looked over at Ryouga, reading the other boy's posture, expression and faint _ki_. In that respect, Ranma felt he knew and maybe even understood the lost boy better than any of his fiancées, even Akane. True, he didn't generally put too much stock on Ryouga's feelings most of the time, but that didn't mean he wasn't able to gauge his often-times opponent's mood. Likewise, while Ryouga was naive enough to fall for repeated Ranma-chan disguises, when in his male form Ranma knew Ryouga could read him pretty well, too.

It was why, out of all the people he knew, Ranma would rather have Ryouga backing him up in a fight than anyone. There were guys more skilled, more intelligent, and more powerful than the bandanna-clad martial artist, but none as familiar and (usually) reliable. They'd even saved each other's lives before, and while they purposefully avoided talking about those times, they were never really far from Ranma's mind.

If Ukyou and Shampoo could just be martial arts rivals instead of rivals for his affection they would be so much better off! The idea of them not liking him still left something of a bitter, jealous taste in his mouth, but he knew it had to happen eventually. Two years was long enough for this sort of nonsense to continue, even if ending it would hurt his pride (and some people's feelings).

"Must be some important stuff," Ukyou said, leaning casually against a wall opposite the two boys and holding out her cup of water before taking a quick drink. "You both look like we're going to be walking into a trap or something."

Ryouga and Ranma exchanged glances.

"It isn't that, is it?" Ukyou asked, a little sliver of worry entering her tone.

"Nah. Nothing like that!" Ranma assured her, still leisurely snacking on his trail mix. "It's serious in a different way."

Ryouga mumbled something under his breath, and Ranma decided to lighten up the mood a bit.

"You know, I actually transformed the other day." He eyed the cold water in Ukyou and Ryouga's hands and laughed a bit. "I was in the men's shower, down by the gym, ya know? My face was all sweaty, so I splashed it with some water from the sink without even thinking. Turned girl right in front of that guy from Echo Squad, what's his name? The black guy. You know who I'm talking about, right Ucchan?"

"Richard, I think." Ukyou paused to think about it for a second. "He's Canadian, isn't he? I didn't think they had… well… black guys in Canada. I thought they were all in the States or something."

"Anyway, so I turn into a girl, red hair and everything, and he's like…" Ranma tried to bug out his eyes and form his face into the most shocked expression he could manage. "And he says, 'What the fuck?!' and I'm kicking myself for forgetting about the curse, so I just go like, 'What the problem, huh?' and he starts freaking out. Hilarious! I think he's avoiding me now. Probably thinks the curse is contagious or something."

Ukyou laughed - a carefree happy sound. "I was pretty surprised when I first saw it, too, Ranchan!"

"Maybe you just weird him out, Ranma," Ryouga sounded his normal sour self, but he was visibly holding back a smile.

"Yeah, well, my curse is less of a shocker than…" Ranma bit his mouth shut, having nearly forgotten Ukyou was around. "Than… others…" he finished a little lamely.

Ukyou seemed to sense something was amiss, and she looked from one of the guys to the other, but nothing came of her scrutiny. When neither said anything to elaborate, she took the opportunity to ask something that had been on her mind for a while.

"Ne, Ran-chan, are you ever going to get rid of your curse?" she asked, hoping it wasn't too out of place.

Ranma's cheer deflated at the question, but his smile didn't completely disappear.

"Maybe. I dunno." He tucked a bit of hair behind his right ear with his thumb, and relaxed more against the wall. "It ain't like I want to spend the rest of my life like this. I mean, I can joke about it now because that was the first time in, man, in weeks, since I turned without meanin' to. I've been a guy more since I came here than I have been since I got the curse. It must be because this place is so structured, so orderly; there aren't a lot of ways to get splashed. It's not Nerima, that's for sure."

"But…" Here, he did frown. "I'll be going back to Nerima, eventually. Maybe then I'll try it. I want to be cured, but it's a heavy price for me to pay, Ucchan. I don't know what I'll be like losing those memories… losing those…"

He trailed off, and saw Ryouga with his arms crossed and eyes closed.

"Feelings?" Ukyou supplied. Ryouga's eyes opened at her words, and both boys stared at her in surprise.

"Don't be so surprised," Ukyou said, seeing their confusion. "Ryouga here lost his feelings for Akane, didn't you sugar?"

"When?" Ryouga asked, "When did you…?"

"During the training. You'd just blasted me, and while I was on the floor, I put two and two together and figured it out." Ukyou took a slightly longer than normal drink from her cup and let her words sink in. "So, yeah, I know. And I think I know why you really don't want to use that drowned man water, Ranchan."

She didn't say any more, and the three martial artists looked off in different directions. Ranma seemed to be wrestling with what Ukyou had proposed, and whether he wanted to admit it to himself or not. It was so much easier to just say (and it was true, too) that he didn't want to forget or lose any martial arts skills he had learned when in his girl form. Ryouga, on the other hand, seemed to be mulling over what he knew of what he had done as P-chan, and how Ukyou knowing the truth could lead to trouble down the road. And both boys were troubled by one other thing.

"I won't tell Akane, if that's what you're worried about," Ukyou spoke up, guessing correctly.

"You won't?" Ranma's spirits lifted a bit at that. At the very least he wouldn't be walking wounded for the next few months. Akane learning the truth about P-chan from Ukyou would not be pretty.

"Mind if I ask why?" Ryouga asked, typically suspicious of most anyone's motives when it came to these things.

"It isn't really my business," Ukyou replied casually. "This mess is between you three, and I'll let you guys fess up as to why you were keeping Akane in the dark for this long when you think the time is right. There's more important stuff to deal with now, anyway."

There was a round of silent agreement between them.

"And I do owe you one," she then added. "For the training. And for my dad."

Ryouga smiled a bit at that. "You don't owe me anything, Ukyou. Though I would like to see that new _ki _attack of yours…"

"Oh, you will!" Ukyou promised with an evil grin. Flames danced in her eyes as they glinted ominously. "I intend to pay you back in full for every Lion Roar Shot you battered me with!"

"Hmm… is that any way to talk to your sensei?" The lost boy asked with faux-curiosity. Ukyou's fire breathing visage loomed over him, and a second later she had him in a playful headlock. Ranma just laughed, smiling at the two of them. His two best friends, such as they were…

A few seconds later, Mousse showed up, favoring the sight of Ukyou trying to subdue Ryouga Hibiki with a curiously raised eyebrow. With him was Konatsu, who just shook his head at the display. After a minute, things had calmed down, and Shampoo, Ryu and Kuno made an appearance.

It was time for the meeting to begin.

After filing into the adjacent room and letting everyone get seated, Ranma handed out the information they'd prepared beforehand. Just as he had recently had his clearance level bumped up to level three in all three of the major fields of information, the others had been approved for increased clearance as well. They were all at level two, now, giving them access to much more sensitive data. It was Ranma's job (and Ryouga's) to prepare what information they thought immediately relevant for the mission ahead.

They had also been given a free hand at planning out their approach as well.

Handing a copy of the essential printouts to Shampoo, Ranma was struck by what Miss Hinako would have thought of his work habits now. Or any of his teachers back in Furinkan. None of it – all that school work and projects and papers – had ever seemed really important, not when compared to life or death struggles and martial arts duels. It still wasn't like he enjoyed spending hours researching and compiling reports or papers, but he could see that there was some actual use in it. It was encouraging to think he could, if he applied himself, succeed in things other than martial arts.

Returning to his seat, he let everyone look over the papers. Ryouga had already set up the presentation and prepared the display screen. After doing the same thing a dozen times, they'd gotten much quicker at setting everything up. No more ten minute delays while they struggled with the computer or the photocopier! After a few minutes, he could sense that the mood of the room had turned somber at what exactly their mission seemed to entail.

Ranma cleared his throat, getting everyone's attention, and began.

"Out target is this…" Ranma began the briefing, and immediately the picture of a large cargo ship appeared on the room's main display monitor. There was a picture of the ship at a harbor somewhere, and a picture from overhead, taken by a satellite.

"This is the Procyon; a bulk cargo ship about a hundred and eighty meters long… It was recently purchased by a corporation that we now know is under the influence of alien conspirators, and it is currently in the South China Sea heading towards the Taiwan Strait. The Commander wants the ship boarded, searched, and…" Ranma frowned deeply at this part. "Sunk."

"Except for two men, there are to be no survivors," he continued, making the fact crystal clear. "The ship is simply to disappear at sea with all hands."

The assembled martial artists grumbled among themselves, looking around for… what? Ranma wasn't sure even they knew. Assurance, maybe. Ryouga coughed, and made as if to stand, but Ranma held out his hand. He would handle this, just as he had said he would.

"We believe," he said, speaking loud enough to regain the room's attention. "That there is a substantial armed presence on board the ship that is aware of its true nature. Intel also believes that the command staff are all complicit with crimes against humanity, as outlined by the UNETCO Charter. I can understand if this raises some problems with you guys, but we have our orders, and we swore an oath… to XCOM, to our Commanders, and to ourselves. We're soldiers, and that can mean taking another's life in the line of duty."

"I don't see the problem!" Shampoo scoffed, brushing back her long violet hair with her hand. Her English still retained some Amazon-esque inflection. "These are bad men, right? And our enemies? Enemies are for killing, and that's that."

"It would not be the first time I have taken a life," Mousse added in, adjusting his glasses with two fingers. "All martial artists should be at least mentally prepared to take that step. Any fight can turn fatal, after all."

Konatsu just sat silently, and Ryu seemed unperturbed.

Ukyou and Kuno, on the other hand, seemed a little less sure of themselves. Ukyou looked down at the papers spread out on the table in front of her, and Kuno had his chin resting on his steepled fingers. Despite any statements to the contrary, back before Nerima when she still wanted revenge on Ranma, Ukyou had never had any intention to actually follow through. Wound him, yes, but kill him… she couldn't imagine it. It didn't help that society, and popular culture, had spent the last twenty years telling her that good guys didn't kill. Likewise, Kuno, for all his boasting about "smiting" his enemies, now found the prospect a little intimidating. And, yes, frightening.

"That said," Ranma interrupted the thoughts of those present, steering them back to the task at hand. "We have several objectives. This is one of them. Ryouga?"

The lost boy tapped a key on the desk keyboard, and the display monitor changed to show a middle aged bald Caucasian man in a labcoat. He had a loose and scruffy beard, and next to the picture, there was table with vital data, including height, weight, ethnicity, and other information. Below the main picture were two others, taken from a government database.

"This man is Doctor Iosif Aliyev," Ranma explained, "You saw some of this stuff already on the printout we made about him. He had some involvement in the development of chemical weapons, back in the 70s. His background was a secret, and he stayed pretty quiet after the Cold War ended, even getting a consulting job for a European Pharmaceutical company. A couple years ago, he disappeared. Made some kind of spiritual journey to India or something. Intel says this guy is running things on board the Procyon."

"They're making a chemical weapon, then?" Mousse ventured. "Seems pretty crude, I mean, compared to everything we're involved in here."

Ranma nodded. "You're right, but that doesn't make it any less of a danger. Groups like this, guys allied with the aliens, have attacked the families of people they found working for UNETCO. They've bombed buildings that XCOM uses as a front, or that sell us stuff. If they're developing some kind of chemical weapon bomb, they won't use it against us. They'll use it against people who can't defend themselves, just to get to us."

"Where did this Intel come from?" Ryu asked, speaking up for the first time. "It doesn't say in any of the papers here."

"Interrogations, mostly," Ryouga answered, before Ranma could potentially say too much. "Done psionically. Very reliable."

"Any other questions?" Ranma asked quickly, looking at the faces around the table. "No? Ok. We need to capture this guy to determine just what sort of weapon they're making on that ship, and if anyone else is involved. He's our number one target. If we get the chance, Command would also like an auto-hack on any computer systems we find…"

Ranma continued, pointing out the other person Command would like apprehended: the ship's Captain. He wasn't considered nearly as important as the head researcher, but the leader of Juliet Squad obviously wanted to keep the loss of life to a minimum. He then went on to describe the safety protocols they would be using (since there was the strong possibility of exposure to biological or chemical toxins on the ship) and then details about the ship's known (or suspected) schematics. When he was done, and the briefing near concluded, the Operation was christened: Winter Triangle.

None of them could have foreseen, then, where that mission would ultimately take them.

* * *

Yet, for all the rightness of what I told her then, I still often wondered if it was accurate. XCOM is not just about defeating the alien foe and defending Earth. That may have been how it started, but I think it is more – it is a human community, drawn from all across the globe. I think they all see, to one degree or another, the future. The new future that the post-war world will become. Is it the present day world we fight for, or is it that dream of what must surely be on the horizon, waiting only for our victory?

* * *

Ryu cracked his knuckles and looked across the table at his opponents. They were a confident bunch, well, except for Konatsu, and tension was beginning to run high. Inhaling deeply, he could just smell Sergeant Feretti's too-minty nicotine gum. The man was all smiles, and impossible to read. Ryu rested his hand over his cards, still face down on the table, and licked his lips. It wasn't a tell, he was just doing it because the air here was a tad too dry, but he hoped someone else would assume it was some subconscious action related to his game hand. 

Sitting just to Feretti's left; Konatsu carefully removed four green chips and placed them in the pot, at the middle of the table. Ryu watched the girly boy's face, but Konatsu's expression was the same as always: polite and quietly cheerful. He seemed happy just to be playing with people and enjoying a new game, but Ryu already had a feel for his character. He wasn't a gambler by nature; he was cautious, and loathe to part with money. Also having some from an impoverished background, Ryu could understand that mentality, but he considered himself far more adventurous than the timid genius ninja.

"I'll see the four," Konatsu said quietly.

It was a small bet, especially after the last round, but everyone was waiting on the river card – the fifth community card, yet to be dealt. With Konatsu's bet, the pot held a good hundred dollars, American. There hadn't been much high betting this hand, but everyone was still in, so the pot was pretty rich. They were playing with a spread limit, five to ten dollar bets to start, and ten to twenty in the forth betting round.

The game was Texas hold 'em.

Ryu enjoyed a good gamble, but UNETCO placed pretty strict regulations on how much one could indulge in the vice. Accounting kept a keen eye on everyone's records, and policy was that no more than 2.5 of monthly earnings could be used for recreational gambling on UNETCO bases. They all made a good 20k a month, in US currency, tax exempt, so that left about $500 for games of chance. Ryu had taken part in games before, usually informal get-togethers with whoever was available, but this time there was a little Tournament arranged between the troops under Captain Banks and the ones under Ben-Solomon (plus the two new squads). Everyone had ended up participating, but he'd been one of the first to sign up.

Sergeant Mario Feretti was the current dealer. Clockwise from him sat Konatsu, then one of the Squaddies from Alpha Squad (an Irishman named Byrne), then Lieutenant Kimberly Lofquist, then him. Ryouga was hanging around, too, having been the first to lose all his money. It was actually pretty pitiful. Still, he'd brought his work with him, and (probably because Shirokuro hadn't arrived to lead him back to his room) he was sticking around.

Feretti put down the fifth and final community card: an eight of clubs.

"Ten." Konatsu, the first to bet when Feretti was dealer, made the minimum investment for the final round. Next to him, Byrne folded, shaking his head.

"I'll see that ten and raise you five," Lieutenant Lofquist said and smiled, adding in a blue chip as well as a red. She then turned to Ryu, hoping to divide his attention, but he didn't let her throw him off. His hand looked pretty promising. The community cards were a Jack of clubs, a Queen of hearts, a six of diamonds and now a six of clubs and an eight of clubs. His Queen of clubs and ten of clubs gave him a flush, though he'd also been hoping for a straight as an alternative hand.

"Why not? I'm game." Ryu picked out two of his own chips, representing fifteen dollars, and added it to the pile.

"I don't mind throwing my money away," Feretti joked, matching the bet. "You in, Konatsu?"

"I think so," the shinobi turned soldier replied, adding five to the pot.

"Let's see 'em, then, ladies and gents," Sergeant Feretti turned over his two cards: a jack and a queen of hearts and spades. It was a high two pair. Konatsu went next, revealing a ten of hearts and a nine of diamonds: a Queen-high straight. Feretti groaned at the sight, and Konatsu bowed his head politely.

"Not bad," Ryu commented, when he saw Lieutenant Lofquist holding back revealing her cards. She was playing coy, but that was fine with him. She'd have to bite the bullet if she thought she was going to beat him. He let them see his Queen-high flush, and favored the senior officer with a grin.

"Sorry, boys," she finally said, a moment after turning her cards face up.

Eight of spades, 6 of hearts: Full House, eights over sixes.

"You're killing us, Lieutenant!" Feretti made an exaggerated defeated sound, like he'd been punched in the gut, and started gathering up the cards before handing them to Konatsu to deal. "You sure you're not picking up on our vibes or something like that?"

"It doesn't work that way any you know it, Feretti," Lofquist replied, and shook her head at his comment. "Really, why can't you just accept that you're being honestly outplayed?"

"Out-lucked maybe," he grumbled.

"What do you mean it doesn't work that way?" Konatsu asked politely, while shuffling the deck of cards.

Kimberly Lofquist inched the small PSI pin on her collar between her thumb and index finger. Both Ryu and Konatsu knew what it meant: that the bearer was registered and approved for psionic warfare. It was to be worn at all times when in uniform, just like the rank pips. It was the aspiration of all soldiers with high psi strength to eventually become proficient in mental warfare.

"They give you this when your psi skill reaches level fifty," she said in reply, a wan smile on her lips. "And suddenly everyone thinks you're some kind of Star Wars Jedi or something. I can't even do any TK, and without an amp, I can't read anyone's thoughts. I can feel emotions when I put some effort into it, but only in an abstract way…"

"Ah, you know I didn't mean anything, Kim - just blowing hot air." Feretti shrugged, again, in an exaggerated fashion. Next to him, Konatsu put the cards down and let Squaddie Byrne split them before starting to deal the next two card hand to those around the table.

"If'n you ask me, you and all tha other psis are going to be treated a little like those Jedi when this is all over," said Squaddie spoke up, a natural and pronounced Irish accent indicating that he had learned English the natural way, rather than having it flash imprinted into his brain. "It's in tha public imagination. They're gonna to expect ya to be more than just normal guys and gals."

"Or they'll expect us to be evil mind-stealing fascists," Lofquist said hotly. "Or they'll see us as half again like the aliens we've been fighting."

"The brass'll know how to handle it," Feretti assured her, and checked his pocket cards. So did the others, while Byrne and Lofquist supplied the small and big blinds respectively, on the other of five and ten dollars. Ryu took a second look at his pocket cards, an ace of hearts and a five of spades, and then put ten in the pot. Around the table, Feretti matched the bet, and so did Byrne. Konatsu, however, folded early; no doubt stinging from the losses he'd suffered on his last hand.

"What are you planning to do once the war is over, Feretti?" Lofquist asked as the Flop round began, with Konatsu dealing out the five community cards – three face up, two face down.

"Ah, after the war… I always thought: a nice home in Tuscany and a pretty young wife to spend the nights with. That sounds about right!" The Italian man grinned widely at the idea, and nudged the current card dealer playfully. "How around you, Konatsu? Got any plans besides winning over that cute chef friend of yours?"

Konatsu covered his mouth with his hand and blushed.

"Please, Feretti-san," the ninja eventually replied. "Don't joke around like that…"

"Another of Ranma's girls!" Ryu jumped in, enjoying the ribbing. "I wouldn't have minded running into her when I first stopped by Nerima. Definitely cute, just like Konatsu here likes 'em."

Now Konatsu was actually pouting.

"Actually…" The genius ninja crossed his arms smartly, smiling a little. "I would like to go to college and get a degree. I don't particularly enjoy fighting, and when this is all over, I want to be able to earn an honest living."

"Being a shinobi isn't an honest living?" Ryu asked, though he already suspected the answer Konatsu would give.

"No," he said, simply. "It isn't. I was always happier serving tables than going back to what I was doing before I met Miss Ukyou and Saotome-taichou."

Taking a lull in the conversation, the bets went around the table. The community cards were an ace of diamonds, an eight of spades, and a six of hearts. Byrne checked, as did Lofquist. Ryu decided to put out a five to start with. He had two pair, aces, and while it was hardly a great hand he didn't think anyone present was carrying anything much better. If nothing else, it gave him a small feeling of security bluffing. The other three met the small bet, but didn't try and raise it.

Konatsu turned over the next community card: an eight of clubs.

Byrne nodded at the sight, and put in ten, the maximum initial bet for this round of play. At the sight, everyone immediately thought the same thing: three of a kind. But that could just as easily be his bluff to cover a poor hand. Kim remained in the game, and Ryu matched the bet as well, but Sergeant Feretti shook his head – he was folding.

The last card turned face up: a jack of hearts.

Again, Byrne dropped the maximum bet: two red chips, representing twenty dollars. Mulling over her odds for a few seconds, Lieutenant Lofquist reached for her chips, hesitated, and shook her hand indicating a fold. It was down to just the two Squaddies.

'Let's see if he's really bluffing,' Ryu thought with a smirk, not just sticking twenty in the pot, but raising it by the same amount. Two seats to Ryu's right, Byrne sighed, fingers trailing through his messy pile of remaining money. After a few seconds of indecision, he flicked two red chips into the pot.

Byrne, being immediately left of the dealer, showed his cards first: a mere King high (plus the two eights in the community hand and the ace). Ryu's smile grew, showing teeth. He turned up his pocket cards, savored the look on his beaten foe's face, and reaped his reward: a hundred and five, all profit. Meanwhile, Konatsu collected the cards and passed them along to the new dealer to his left.

"How about you, Lieutenant?" Ryu asked while carefully sorting his money according to color – and thus, value. He didn't like messy piles. "What do you want to do after the war?"

"Truth be told, I never gave it much thought," she replied, "I guess I could go back to Sweden and try and get back into the Home Guard, or maybe the police. I know a few other people want to try running for office when the war is over, so that's an option too. What about you?"

"I made a vow, ten years ago, to rebuild the family dojo." Ryu leaned back in his chair. "Only death will stop me from fulfilling my promise. Of course, I'll have to set things straight with the bank, get the family credit back in good order, and probably get another job after the war… but that shouldn't be too hard. After this, getting work as a military consultant should be easy. Then it's just a matter of getting permission to teach my form of the Yamasenken."

At the mention of martial arts, Ryouga's eyes peeked up over his work.

"How are you going to manage that?" he asked, flipping a pen between his fingers.

"I'm already looking into it. You'll see." Ryu then went back to the game, as his cards were dealt; face down, in front of him. It was time for the next round.

But before it could begin, someone new approached the table.

"How's the game going, boys and girls?" the newcomer asked, walking around from Ryu's left side. "Ryouga-kun, lost already, huh?"

"Stupid game…" said lost boy mumbled.

"Ryu-kun," Nabiki said with a friendly smile, as she stood behind him, one hand on the back of his chair. "Please tell me your commanding officer lasted at least a few hands."

"He was unlucky, that's all," Ryu responded, giving the leader of India Squad the benefit of the doubt. Of course, it wasn't true, but Nabiki didn't need to know that.

"Unlucky? Surely not our resident lost boy." Nabiki's tone, while sarcastic, was playful and Ryouga just let out a loud huff. She then faced the others across the table. "Sergeant Feretti, good to see you again. Remember to check your email before you turn in tonight. Konatsu-kun! I hope you're having fun. Seeing how much you've won, I guess you won't be needing any more tutoring, but if you're still interested, you have my email. Miss Lofquist! My money's on you going on to face Sergeant Harrison in the final round."

"You already have their money. You don't need to sweet talk them."

"Ryouga-kun, you wound me!"

"Everything's fine, Nabiki." Ryu looked over his shoulder at the middle Tendo daughter. She was a sly one, and smart, too. He could tell by how confident she was that she had a natural skill at remembering faces and names, and unlike the rest of the Nerima girls, she knew how to take advantage of her good looks without being too aggressive or obvious in it.

"How's… _that_ project going?" he asked, trying to sound nonchalant. Just because he didn't really trust her as a person, didn't mean he wasn't willing to make use of her abilities and services, as varied as they were.

"Don't you worry about that…! We're both going to be very happy with our investment." She sounded like she had everything under control, but then again she always did. He'd have to keep a close eye on her, and how much money she made (or lost) with what he'd given her access to. He was a gambling man, but a little prudence could save a lot of money.

"What brings you to our table, Nabiki?" Lofquist asked, her tone indicating she was eager to get back to the game. Ryu got the impression that his sense of caution towards Nabiki was manifested as a mild dislike in Lieutenant Lofquist. Of course, the older woman hadn't let that deter her from entering the Texas hold 'em Tournament that Nabiki had organized.

"I just need to have a few words with poker face over here," Nabiki said, Lofquist's brusque tone not bothering her in the least. Ryouga frowned, but nodded, as he was expecting the visit. Putting a few stray pieces of paper back into a clipboard, he stood and let Nabiki take the lead.

"I'll see you later, Ryu-kun," Nabiki patted him on the shoulder and then waved to the other Nerima boy present. "Konatsu-kun."

As the two walked away from the ongoing poker game, Nabiki mused out loud, as if voicing simple stray thoughts instead of prompting him to talk about a topic she was particularly interested in.

"Things have been pretty exciting today, and I don't just mean the big game," she noted with a small smile. "There's been a lot of rumor and hearsay."

"Things should be getting pretty interesting in a week. Or two," Ryouga said with a shrug. "Sooner than that, for us."

Nabiki seemed to enjoy the double talk. "A party? And I'm not invited?"

"Our guests won't be anyone new." Euphemism for fighting humans, not aliens.

"You're up to something shady, aren't you?" he then asked, this time the question was straight to the point with no hidden meaning.

"What do you consider shady? I'm not doing anything illegal or improper," Nabiki insisted, as they lingered at the end of the rec room. "But if a certain group, let's say a major corporation and its affiliates, were to have the misfortune of being involved in a scandal, or – heaven forbid – a federal investigation, well…"

"Money," Ryouga said the word with contempt. "It's always the same thing… don't you get tired of it all? Card games, favors, importing trinkets and stupid little things for people, burning all those CDs…"

"This base IS technically International Territory, controlled by a non-state actor, and we're personally exempt from prosecution or extradition for anything but a capitol offense. I'm not actually breaking any laws…"

"It's…. dishonest," he insisted. "Unbecoming. I mean, it just seems so… petty. You earn more in a month here than you probably have in your entire life, and you do it honestly."

"You're missing the point entirely, Ryouga-kun," Nabiki rolled her eyes, and leaned shoulder-first against the wall, crossing her arms in mild annoyance. "If you, as a martial artist, doubled in strength every year, wouldn't you still try and hone your skills every day?"

He sighed, closing his eyes, unwilling to see the connection. "That's different."

"Not for me," Nabiki poked him in the chest, causing him to open his eyes. "I enjoy the challenge. Even if it's just a single yen, even if it's just a penny, I want to know I won it from someone. I guess you could say I'd rather take something than have it given to me. That's my personal take on…" Her eyes twinkled mischievously. "Tendo Style, Anything Goes Martial Arts."

"You're going to get killed, with an attitude like that," Ryouga replied, for want of anything better to say. It was obvious enough that he understood where she was coming from, but not where she thought she was going.

"And you won't with yours?" she countered, and dismissed the topic with a haughty wave of her hand. "We're always going to see things differently, Ryouga-kun. You probably think I should be more like Akane, or Kasumi."

He thought about that for a few seconds before answering, "Ukyou once told me I could do to be more like Ranma. But I'm me, and he's him, and that's the way it should be. For better or for worse, you're you, and that's how it should be. But I still think you're attracting too much attention with your antics. Sometimes I wonder if you're taking this situation seriously."

"Those 'antics' are what get you the information you want, Ryouga-kun," she chided. "Which reminds me..."

She handed him a folded up piece of paper.

He took it in one hand, and flipped it open, reading over the form. It was paperwork for the opening of a new personal quarters on the base, indicating the opening of a new residential account, and a new security key. It had already been filled out by some unknown bureaucrat, but Nabiki had secured a copy. It wasn't really very important or secure paperwork, but the job hadn't been just getting hold of it.

"E11," Ryouga read the room number out loud. "Good."

"I still don't see why you wanted to make sure she was going to live on another floor. She's…" Nabiki's normal confidence did falter just a bit. "She's your mother, after all."

Ryouga didn't answer at first, his eyes wandering to the poker game on the far side of the room. Sergeant Feretti seemed to be lamenting another lost hand, while Konatsu (a big pile of red and blue chips in his right hand) tried to comfort his poor mentor. Nabiki could have dropped the point, but she wanted to know his reasoning. She'd initially thought that the lost boy would have been happy about getting easy access to his mother. From what she understood of it, he'd hardly been able to spend much time with her over the last decade of his life.

"She is my mother, yes," Ryouga said, as if sensing Nabiki's genuine interest in hearing more. "I petitioned for her to be here, because I want her to understand why I did what I did to her husband… and because I want her to be safe. But I don't think I could bear to see her every day. The thought of it is too surreal."

Nabiki sighed softly; exasperated by the answer he'd given her. He didn't seem to understand just how valuable family was. She'd taken her mother for granted when she was younger, and when she'd died, it was like the world had been overturned. Still, it wasn't her business to try and straighten out the bizarre-world the lost boy seemed to come from.

"Hey," Nabiki interrupted his thoughts, whatever they had been. He faced her again, a concerned look on his face. To her, it seemed as if he was always expecting bad news but resigned to go forward despite it. She had always thought him strange like that: so full of anger and hatred towards those who wronged or insulted him, but always willing to help a stranger for no reason; no gain. Ranma could be altruistic, too, but his ego and his infuriating self-aggrandizement often got in the way (not that Ryouga's pessimism and intensity weren't any less frustrating).

"Don't go thinking I don't see the big picture here," she assured him, remembering what he had said before. "I do. After what I've read, after what I saw on that… that ship, you won't find anyone who wants us to win this fight as much as I do. I know how important all this is. This place…"

She found herself, for the first time in a while, struggling for words.

"We are literally laying the foundations for the next hundred, or even two hundred, years of human existence. No matter who wins, the world is going to change. I don't know what it'll look like by that time, but the idea of being a part of it is… it's probably the best thing that's ever happened to me, and I know I have you and Ranma to thank for it. Because they really wanted you two, not me."

It was a hard thing for her to admit out loud, and she hoped he understood that.

"You can trust me," she concluded, but repeated it anyway. "You can trust me, Ryouga-kun. I wouldn't ever jeopardize what we have here. Not for anything."

He was silent for a time, but then he nodded.

"I do trust you, Nabiki." Of course, for the most part, he trusted her own self-interest, but he didn't say that. He'd heard more than a few horror stories about Nabiki that had always given him pause around her, but there was something in her voice, something different. It wasn't just that he found himself believing her, but that he wanted to believe her, too.

"After all…" he continued, and smiled sincerely. "I'm relying on you, aren't I?"

A cold black nose nudged him on his elbow, and he saw Shirokuro stand between them, wanting in on the private meeting. Ryouga smiled and reached down to pet the faithful family dog. Seeing her brought up another worry: he needed Shirokuro, but so would his mother if she was to avoid getting lost. Nabiki, though initially a little annoyed by the intrusion, had grown fond of the black and white canine, and she gently scratched the underside of Shirokuro's chin.

"She's coming tomorrow," he said, not to Nabiki, but to the family dog. "Will you follow her over me, girl?"

Nabiki couldn't help but frown a little at the question.

"I guess we'll just have to wait and see."


	42. XCOM UFO Defense III

* * *

Thinking more about it, I think now that XCOM is a siege ladder, and the walls and ramparts are the domain of the aliens, not us. We struggle towards that guarded height, through the hailstorm of arrows and missiles, those before us and beside us falling and dying, but never relenting. XCOM is our siege ladder, and we climb it with a savage desperation that comes from knowing that the alternative is oblivion at worst, or at best an empty existence in which we can only look up, and wonder: "what if?" We climb and struggle and die, because to take that wall, we must earn our foothold with spilt blood and ended lives. The new frontier, history tells us, if very often someone else's doorstep. 

The only direction left is up.

XCOM is our ladder to those battlements set between the stars.

* * *

Life had been less than comfortable for the Master of Anything Goes Martial Arts over the last few months. Nerima had been such a perfect place to kick back and enjoy the waning years of his long life: there had been talented young martial artists to pick fights with, interesting duels every other week, and most importantly a generous ratio of beautiful girls to socially inept guys. How many a day had been spent fondly raiding the girls' locker room in Furinkan, or one of the nearby sorority houses? How many clotheslines, festively decorated with panties and bras just waiting for his expert inspection, had he encountered in that paradise on Earth? 

But it just wasn't safe to go back there now.

And that was saying something when you were the nigh-indestructible esoteric master of a perversion-based martial art. Unfortunately, just leaving the Tokyo area hadn't been enough. There were people after him, and worse than that bunch, there were ex-people chasing him down as well. Not for the first time, he thought about turning himself into the government (or whoever those black suits were), but he doubted they would stomach his "particular" needs. Without a ready supply of female _ki_, preferably gleaned through groping or undergarments, he would have to either go into a recuperative coma (like when his treacherous students had sealed him in that cave for a decade) or die. Given how much he'd been gorging on female _ki_ over the last two years, and how active he'd been, it would probably be the latter.

That just wasn't an option.

He would not let his Art die with him. His was the one and only True Master of _Musabetsu Kakuto Ryu_, taken not just as a philosophy for fighting, but for living as well. So he found himself in Yamaguchi, spending more time running and hiding than having fun. He'd rarely been able to stay long in one place before word of his activities drew unwanted attention, and he was strongly considering giving up on Japan for a few years. At least until the heat died down. It would be easier to get lost in China, if it came to that.

Pausing at the edge of a rooftop, he patted the bag slung over his shoulder, mentally going over the night's paltry pickings. The night was cool, not truly cold, despite the time of year, but it wasn't easy finding sweet things hanging from clotheslines. Oh, how he longed for the full bags he'd enjoyed back in Nerima! Narrowing his eyes, he searched the nearby residential buildings. Down on the street below, the façade of a nightclub glowed blue and red, the sounds from within even reaching his far off perch.

Happosai turned, raising his right arm over his face just as a fist descended from behind. The ground beneath his feet exploded outward as the power of the blow passed through him and into the building's steel framework. A sound like a bomb going off filled his ears, deafening him. Below him, a fifth of the upper floor of the office building was gone, and the steel girder he stood on was visibly deformed. A cloaked shape, obscured by a green rain slicker, twisted through the air before landing softly on another piece of girder.

"Hello, Happi…" Cologne drew back the hood of her slicker, and brushed off a few bits of dust.

Happosai scowled. Normally, he wouldn't have worried about fighting his old Amazon counterpart, but this version of her was something different entirely. He could tell that she was young again, but with all the knowledge of the older her he knew. He didn't typically hold female fighters in high regard – his form of martial arts fed off of female _ki_ after all – but with that slicker on it would be all but impossible to cop a feel or steal an undergarment; his typical _modus apparati_. Worse yet, this Cologne seemed much more vicious than the one he was more familiar with.

"I suppose you had to catch up to me sooner or later, by chance if nothing else. So, you want to fight me, Cologne-chan?" He casually puffed on his pipe, hiding the fact that his arm was still tingling from that blow. He'd been caught virtually unawares, and hadn't had time to properly fortify his body. Now he was paying for it.

"Well," Cologne answered with a wild grin. "You can always just give up."

Blowing a trail of smoke, and shaping it into the form of a lacy bra, he smirked.

"Not likely, I'm afraid," he replied.

"Suit yourself." Cologne all but vanished, but Happosai had already read her Fast Step. His palm intercepted her next blow, nullifying the force entirely. All martial artists learned to direct as much physical force as possible into a blow by adjusting their center of gravity and controlling the movement of their body, and Cologne knew how to take it a step further, directing the _ki_ generated by her body in any given instant into her hand. It made for a devastating blow, but he knew how to counter it with the same technique. She wouldn't catch him flat footed a second time.

He spun through the air, blocking another blow, and slipping into her guard. From this position, he would have normally tried for a grope, but with Cologne's slicker on, he decided to forgo the attempt and just try and pop her left lung. Spinning his pipe between his fingers, he grasped the rounded end and made as if to jab the pointed half into her. To his credit, he was close, but Cologne managed to slap aside the blow while twisting her body out of the way.

She adjusted her footing on the exposed steel girder without looking down, and spread her arms wide. She was lording her new reach advantage over him, and he silently appraised his chances in the encounter. He wasn't in peak condition, and she was stronger (and probably a little faster) than before. They were both intimately familiar with each other's techniques and tricks.

"You've been chasing me for some time now," he said, growing less sure of his chances in a straight up fight. "What do you want?"

"A fresh start, that's all," Cologne explained. "How much longer did we have to live? Thirty years? Forty, at the most? You had Ranma at least, but who did I have as my legacy? Who would survive me?"

Her grin faded, and she snarled. "Shampoo? She was weak! Unworthy of following in my footsteps! Now, my Masters have shown me that there is another possibility for the future. My clones, my sisters, will be the mothers of a new human race… one that will stride boldly among the stars!"

"I know what you're thinking, Happi. You're thinking: you know all my special techniques. You're thinking: Amazon techniques won't be enough to beat you. You're thinking: my opponent is still just _human_." Cologne's smile returned. "But you're wrong. Let me show you _how wrong_."

Happosai twitched and stumbled, a freezing bolt of pain shooting through his brain like a railroad spike. He lost his footing on the girder, slipped, and fell gracelessly into a pile of rubble. For a few seconds, he just curled into a ball and hyperventilated, and then the screaming began. Cologne chuckled, slowly walking along the girder.

"Do you feel that, Happi?" she asked, and to him, her voice was like a thousand jet engines. Blood pooled in his ears. "They call what I have become a 'Trenchard,' after the man who developed the process on himself. Among other changes, the most significant is the development of two small bundles of tissue in the brain. These tissues allow one access to the Mind that watches over this little world, and they allow one to project thoughts, emotions, intentions… in new and remarkable ways."

"Are you listening, Happi!?" She gritted her teeth, focused harder, and Happosai's screams died out. His _ki_ was fluctuating wildly, and she could see that he had lost control of his bowels. The sight of it, the smell, filled her with a sense of power and domination… this man, this disgusting little man, had humiliated the entire Amazon Tribe in their youth.

He had humiliated her.

She had always been the stronger, the most skilled, of the two… but he had always found some way to overcome her. Some way to cheat or fool her. Some way to use words or trickery to get what he wanted! By law, she was his wife, but the spirit and intent of the law were wholly separate when it came to Happosai.

'Finally… I've beaten you…'

YES

A little more.

'It took a hundred years…'

YOU HAVE

Just a little more, and she'd set of a massive stroke in his brain.

'…but I've beaten you… Happosai!'

PERMISSION

It would be over.

But then, a thought interrupted her certain victory: had _she _beaten him? It wasn't her own strength, was it? Was it her power, or was it the power of her Masters? Had she actually overcome him, the one man to foil her time and time again, to humble the might of the Amazons…? Was this victory? She was the greatest of her generation, or so she had been told. She was the genius who had mastered all the great Amazon techniques by the age of eighteen. No one had come close to her in generations, they said.

Only him.

By the time she got her thoughts in order, she saw something in Happosai's hands. Sneering, she covered her face as the _Happodaikarin_ went off, throwing up a cloud of thick smoke and ash. Not only did it blind her field of vision, but it suffused the air with his _ki_, making his exit impossible to trace. She'd lost her concentration, lost her chance, and now he was gone.

In his distance, she heard the sound of police and ambulances approaching.

Happosai knocked open the door to the bathroom, and crashed headlong through the window. He'd had to escape through the building itself, but at least he'd been able to pull himself together enough to create a quick smoke bomb. It was one of his signature moves: a special _ki _attack taking the form of a spherical explosive, allowing him to control its properties. Light and smoke from this one had been sufficient (hopefully) to allow him to elude his pursuer, and the explosion had helped to toss him clear from where he'd fallen.

His mind was still reeling, and as he free fell down the side of the building, he wiped the blood from his nose and ears. Pushing off the wall with his feet, he landed safely and bounced from shadow to shadow. His muscles felt sore, like they'd been put through a taffy pull, but at least his senses were still clear and functional, and the visions and voices were all gone. As for what the Hell Cologne had hit him with… he couldn't imagine. Nothing in his experience compared to it, even the most terrifying aura attack.

His _ki_ was nearly exhausted, too.

There was a hot springs in Yamaguchi. It was a bit of a risk, but he'd have to make his way there and hope he could get hold of a few pretty girls. If nothing else, it would get him enough _ki_ to make his escape. Only then, with sufficient time to think about what had happened, could he plan some sort of counterattack. Stopping briefly to catch his breath and figure out where he was, and how he would get to the hot springs, he saw something wonderfully familiar: a perfect black bra!

Without thinking, he jumped out of the shadows and grabbed the delicate article of clothing, rubbing it against his cheek. It took a full second for him to realize his mistake: there wasn't so much as a trace of female _ki _imprinted on it. Landing on a lamppost, he stared at the bra, and looked around warily for whoever had thrown it into the air. To his relief, he didn't see Cologne, but rather someone new. A man.

"Who the Hell are you, boy?" Happosai growled, still holding onto the bra.

The man, vaguely familiar looking, favored him with a small smile.

"Such a nasty habit you have. Not very hygienic, if you ask me," he said, and Happosai recognized the voice. It was that acupuncture doctor from Nerima.

Happosai swallowed, his tongue starting to tingle.

"What…?" he managed to ask, before something painful made his heart clench. His eyes fell on the bra, still in his hand, and he threw it away with a pained yelp. As it fluttered to the ground, he looked down at his hands. They were shaking. Poison! He'd been poisoned before, many times, and hastily directed his _ki_ towards containing it and keeping his body alive.

"That's right. The bra was coated with dimethyl sulfoxide, allowing it to seep into your blood through the skin," the man explained, walking towards where the undergarment had landed.

"It… won't work…" Happosai sneered. "You don't think… this is the first time I've been poisoned?"

"I suppose not," the man replied, stretching out the latex gloves on his hands and flexing his fingers. "Which is why we picked up something special. Be thankful – you have been given the chance to participate in important scientific research."

Happosai turned, and was about to jump away, when his muscles seized up. He fell unceremoniously off the lamppost and hit the ground with his shoulder. His _ki_ wasn't fighting off the poison! Or if it was, it wasn't doing the job very well. What on Earth had been coated on that bra? Then, suddenly, his body became cold and distant… almost disconnected.

"They say mighty Hercules, undefeated in battle, fell to the poison blood of the Hydra that seeped through his skin. You feel it, don't you, old man?" Dr. Tofu reached down, placing his hand on Happosai's tiny chest. "The dose was very small compared to normal, so the transformation is slow. Painful. You _feel_ it, as it strips away your humanity."

Happosai, Master and Founder of Anything Goes Martial Arts, writhed on the floor as the diluted Chryssalid venom coursed through his body, corrupting and digesting flesh and blood. His skin began to take on a sickly yellow color, and his lips curled back, revealing blackened gums. What was left of his humanity, his mind, was the last to disappear, as the vile toxin seeped into his brain. The last thing he felt, the last thing he thought, was a raging endless… hunger.

Dr. Tofu's glasses glinted, reflecting the bright light of a passing car.

"Even the most resilient of human beings have a limit, don't they?" he asked, and behind him, Cologne landed without a sound.

Looking down at Happosai, or what had once been him, she shook her head.

"My way… would have been better." She frowned. "Happi."

"Such touching sentiment," Tofu remarked with bit of jest. "You should be glad; it seems Dr. Aliyev's experiment was a success. Now finish it off, and let's get going. We have a long trip ahead of us."

On the floor, the small body began to thrash around and get up, a line of drool running down its jaw. There was no spark of sentience in its eyes, no glimmer of humanity. A guttural snarl rose in its throat.

Cologne's fist descended like the wrath of God.

It was just about time to go… Home.

* * *

Hibiki Mitsuko stepped off of the helicopter and looked around the hanger, an expression of worry and confusion on her face. Being lost in strange new places wasn't anything too out of place for a Hibiki, but the people usually weren't so tight lipped. Plus, more often than not, she'd been lost with her husband instead of by herself. The last two days hadn't been very encouraging. There had been doctors, and men in black suits, and strange dreams that she couldn't quite recall. Then there was _him_. 

Just yesterday they had told her that she would be going to live with her son; where he worked. She hadn't been entirely certain how to feel about that. What was her son involved in? What had the family gotten involved in? Some sort of government conspiracy? Some secret society?

That boy, Mousse, had been right: she didn't know her son very well, and she didn't know what sort of trouble he'd been up to over the last few years. She was worried about him, but she was worried about herself as well. One didn't survive long with a curse that not only got you lost, but that drew you to danger, without having a developed sense of self-preservation.

Ducking her head, more than a little perturbed by the still spinning helicopter blades well above her head, she looked carefully around the hanger, and soon saw two figures standing near a doorway. They were headed in her direction. Only when they got closer could Mitsuko confirm that one of them was her son. He was wearing professional looking clothes, a shirt, pants, a tie… the woman was similarly dressed, and Mitsuko wondered if this was the Akari she had heard of. Or maybe that other girl: Akane wasn't it? The only contact she had had over the last decade with her son had been through letters and post-it notes.

For her part, Mitsuko still wore her clothes from before, including the khaki colored drill jacket she had gotten in the US. She wasn't keen to part with any of her standard clothes, from the white _hadajuban_ undershirt to the black sash she wore, because they all doubled as weapons she could use in an emergency. Besides, they all had sentimental value, having acquired them in one adventure or another. The sound of footsteps behind her momentarily distracted her, and she saw the other man who had sat next to her in the transport: a Kyoto man named Kuonji. Next to him, another black suit stood with a clipboard.

"Ukyou!" the man cried, running towards Ryouga and the other woman, obviously this Ukyou person.

"Papa!" She greeted the man with a hug, and the two embraced happily, laughing and happy. A part of Mitsuko wanted to run towards her son, to cup his cheeks in her hands, to hug him, to cry over him, and to tell him how happy she was to see him again. And she was happy… but… to express it like that, to him, seemed strange. He wasn't the pre-teen she remembered. He was a man, and she couldn't bear the thought of him pushing her away.

"Son," she said, instead, and bowed her head.

He bowed back. "Mother."

Politeness, custom, formality – more would develop later, wouldn't it, between mother and son? She looked closely at his face and saw the seriousness of his father, but little of the playfulness. Wasn't he happy to see her, too? Or was he just as unsure as she was?

The escort in a black suit standing nearby spoke up then, in English, "Hibiki, Mitsuko. Kounji, Kazuo. The time is nine hundred hours and twelve minutes."

"I'll sign for them." Ryouga took the clipboard from the man, and signed the two papers on the top once each. Handing it back, the two nodded to each other, and the man in the black suit headed back for the helicopter. In the background, Mitsuko could hear Ukyou and her father talking, but she barely listened. The stranger that was her son stood before her, and she didn't know what to do or say. She wished dearly that Tetsuya had been around, since he and Ryouga had spent more time together and they seemed to get along pretty well.

"Ryouga," she began, and tried to absorb the magnitude of the place they stood in. Was that a flying saucer parked over there?

"What's going on?" she asked, neatly summing up all the questions she could think of asking. "Who are these people?"

"I've secured a room for you here," he said, a little awkwardly. "You'll be well taken care of. This is a military base operated by an organization called UNETCO. Or XCOM."

"XCOM?" She couldn't help but stare, as what looked like a miniature flying saucer slowly floated across the hangar with a man trailing behind it, reading something on a notepad computer. Elsewhere, a much more massive saucer with a pattern of three diamonds emblazoned on it seemed to be undergoing some sort of repair work. Her son seemed to be employed by these people, so at least he wasn't in any immediate danger, but it all seemed so… hard to believe.

"What… what is XCOM?"

He sighed, tucking his hands into his pants pockets.

"Please follow me inside, mother," he finally said, turning towards the door from where he had come. "I'll explain on the way."

* * *

XCOM 

XCOM is a group sworn to defend the Earth. We are the livestock that would rise up and fight the farmer. We are the soldiers who fight to the last man. Our enemies surround us and attack from all sides, but we fight on, outnumbered and outgunned, gladly accepting whatever comes in the cause of rightness and human dignity.

XCOM is the madness that screams: Never Again!

And we'll win, or die trying.


	43. Snake Hunter I

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. It was during the autumn of 2006 that the Unryu farm was made the victim of these Visitors. Inadvertently leading the aliens back to Nerima after the trauma of his abduction, Ryouga and Ranma got their first taste of combat against the alien menace. Eventually rescued from a crashed ship by XCOM, the extraterrestrial combat organization branch of UNETCO, the Nerima Wrecking Crew has been conscripted into the war as two special four man squads: India and Juliet.

The UNETCO timetable moves ever forward, but a new complication has arisen as the alien forces in the Far East surge out in unexpected numbers and with surprising fury.

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia**  
Chapter XV  
_Snake Hunter  
_

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

All hell shall stir for this. 

King Henry V. Act v. Sc. 1.

* * *

They met in darkness, as came more naturally to them. They were blind, but they saw all that transpired around them. They were deaf, but they knew the words before they were even spoken. They were mute, but their orders were followed without question. They were frail, but they were feared by all. 

So they met in darkness.

Hollow Eyes ranked third among them, though they were equals in the impression of the Mind. His expertise and goals were, however, considered outlandish and unorthodox, and so his standing among those three 'equals' suffered. To his left floated Scarred Face, the unhealed plasma burns that so marked him obvious even in his psionic extra-sensory presence. He was old. He had seen much; done much, and he had little to prove. He was first among them for this.

To Scarred Face's left, Wink floated, the strong reddish tinge of his robes reflecting his fierce ambitions. He was physically deformed, not that that mattered to an Ethereal, with one eye socket grown over by bone and mottled flesh. Across from the three Ethereals, their servitors stood, waiting. They, too, were three: Sectoid, Muton, Snakeman.

IT COMES

"They will intercept it." Zraz was the only one present with an actual name. He, like his Snakemen comrades, remained primitive creatures who clung to an individual identity as a reason for existence. They were limited beasts, given paltry weapons and simple aims.

"We are also concerned," the Sectoid projected his thoughts as a proper intelligent being should, though they were tentative and near muted compared to an Ethereal's mental tempest. "Without sufficient Elerium, we rely too heavily on infiltrates."

WE CAN NOT RELY ON THOSE

THEY ARE WEAK

Hollow Eyes disagreed with Wink, un-surprisingly.

THEY SERVE US WELL WE CAN MAKE MORE

UNTESTED

THE NEW BATCH OF SERVANTS ARE READY WE CAN USE THEM

MORE

Scarred Face needed think no more to prompt the Muton overseer.

"The new soldiers are unstable," the massive creature spoke in a guttural tongue, for the benefit of Zraz. The Ethereals and the Sectoid heard his thoughts clearly enough without the need for coarse sounds. "They think about themselves. Two have self-executed. The new programming is not being safely assimilated."

Hollow Eyes shared his thoughts before Wink got the chance to defend his project.

THEY ARE LIMITED SERVANTS THESE THOUGHTS ARE NOT COMPATIBLE THEY CAN NOT COMPREHEND OR FUNCTION WITH THEM

ITERATION WILL RESOLVE THE PROBLEMS UNDESIRABLE RESULTS WILL BE EXPENDED ITERATION WILL BRING PERFECTION

As usual, it fell to Scarred Face to make the decision.

The Ethereal Commander's tiny golden eyes glowed hotly.

EXPEND THEM

Hollow Eyes was not pleased by the dictate. It was a waste of resources to keep making new batches of mutons and floaters using hybridized mental programming. They did not have the minds to process the information properly. It was no surprise that they were unstable. The waste, the inefficiency, made his thoughts sour. Even if he could benefit from Wink's project being discredited, his priority was always to serve the interests of the Mind.

But if he would not have proper soldiers to carry out his desires, infiltrates would have to do. Scarred Face was not averse to the prospect, and Wink was openly dismissive of it, but the Mind would recognize Hollow Eyes' worth and ability. The Mind would approve of him, and his existence would be justified. He reached out with his formidable mind, contacting one of his infiltrate thralls.

IT IS TIME

Hollow Eyes then added, for good measure.

DEMONSTRATE YOUR VALUE

The tiny trembling human mind replied with energetic acceptance. Just like that, it was put into motion. Those of no use would be removed from circulation. In time, it would be as if they never existed.

* * *

November 29 

The mission had gone belly up from almost the moment of insertion.

Ranma gritted his teeth and cringed as a flash of green light, blindingly fast even to him, tore through the air. It eventually hit one of a line of cherry trees flanking the inside of the villa driveway, and an instant later the trunk exploded from the inside, spraying charred-to-the-point-of-ash splinters in every direction. He was just outside the residential home of Takashi Somei, Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. It wasn't a social visit.

They'd been ambushed less than a minute after leaving the Lightning and right from the get go these aliens had proven to be rather different from the ones Juliet and India squad had faced before. Ranma tried to calm himself after the near miss. They were up against Snakemen, and good ones, too. Not that he had any personal experience with the breed before, but he'd read plenty about them. They were soldiers, skilled, practiced; dangerous.

"Saotome-taichou," Konatsu reported; Ranma heard him over their secure intercom. "We've taken the last of the guards to a secure area. They should be safe."

"Roger, Juliet Two. Juliet Three? Are you in position yet?"

Shampoo's reply belied her situation. She was breathing heavily, and not from exhaustion. He'd heard an explosion off in her direction, but she'd informed him then that she as unhurt. His HUD readout of all four Juliet Squad members confirmed it. She'd obviously been rattled, however, and was still recovering.

"Yes, but…" she managed to say, and her voice calmed somewhat. The tension told in her speech, which began to revert more to what he was used to from her Nerima days. "Not good. Not very good. They used grenade, or maybe bomb. I need… need to find better position."

Ranma weighed his options.

"Alright," he decided. "Konatsu, leave the guards and back up Shampoo. Move around to the south."

"Roger," Konatsu replied, his voice reserved as was his usual, even under pressure. Shampoo replied with the same word, if not the same tone. Ranma wasn't happy just leaving the guard's they'd recovered by themselves, but there was no choice. They were running out of time, plain and simple.

At exactly 7:12 PM, 29th of November, Radar and Hyperwave decoders belonging to UNETCO Far East confirmed the incursion of two alien craft in the upper atmosphere, flying side by side at around Mach 4.8. Three minutes later, aircraft were scrambled to intercept the UFOs: a large scout and a battleship. Four minutes after that, a UFO was detected rising from the lower atmosphere, just as another dropped out of orbit. Emergency reserve craft were routed to intercept.

By 7:29, the air battle had begun. Interceptors – Mach 3 fighter aircraft using the finest Earth based fuels and technology – were busy chasing down the weaker and smaller UFOs, trying to maneuver close enough to engage with plasma beams. The ship mounted weapons had a fifty two kilometer effective range, but against a speeding alien craft that could maneuver in defiance of inertia and gravity, that was easier said than done. The most powerful XCOM craft: an Avenger and two Firestorms (the former being a large Earth-alien hybrid design, and the latter simply Earth-built UFOs), concentrated on the battleship.

During the conflagration, at 7:31 PM, another large scout was detected in the lower atmosphere. A minute and a half later, the ship's mission profile was decoded: Alien Infiltration. Given the highly sensitive nature of an infiltration mission, the only remaining reserve craft in Seiran Mountain had been scrambled to shoot down the ship if possible, or prevent the success of the alien's mission on the ground if necessary. By 7:35 PM the Lightning (another Earth-built UFO, designed as a fighter-transport) took off with the two remaining squads on the base: India and Juliet. The others had already been loaded onto the base's Skyranger and Avenger, to effect ground assault on one of the supply ships and the battleship respectively.

During the flight, Ranma and Ryouga had tried to brief their squads.

Alien Infiltration, the most insidious of all activities: the aliens were trying to either coerce or control a government official, or covertly replace him with an alien hybrid or clone. More information would have to be gleaned during and after combat. The enemies were Snakemen, which meant a determined and organized resistance of the second-to-worst sort. These aliens had no outstanding weaknesses, but while bullets would be less than effective against them, lasers and plasma would work just fine. Estimated opposition was between eight and sixteen individuals, but probably twelve or fourteen.

On arrival, the Lightning had scanned the area. They had access to an up to date map of the area, but alien interference was preventing real time spy satellite updates. Immediately the signs of an Alien Infiltration were obvious: the guards were all unconscious, either knocked out by the gravitic distortion caused by the UFO as it landed or by the aliens themselves. The moment the Squads had moved to secure the bodies and move them out of the way, the aliens had opened fire.

Ranma could still remember the sound of one of the parked cars behind them, as a stray blast turned it into a fireball. The frame was still a molten mess, glowing red hot in the night like an ingot of gold. Luckily, they had used Konatsu's ninjutsu clones to approach the area first, and so no one 'real' had been killed in the ambush. Konatsu had taken it like a fist to the gut, however, and Ranma had been reminded once again that the agony the genius ninja had to endure in his role as scout wasn't imaginable to someone like him.

"It feels like I'm dead," Konatsu had said once, about the experience. "When I get shot, there's… just pain and light."

Ranma motioned to Ukyou, who was crouched behind a stone wall, her rifle held tight to her chest. She nodded, and used one of her polished spatulas to look over the top of the wall without exposing her body. He gave her a few seconds, but it didn't look like she could see anything about the alien (or aliens) pinning them down.

"Contact! Tango! No: two of them!" It was Ryu's voice. India Squad was advancing towards the villa from the northwest, to get into the building from the kitchen backdoor.

"Damnit, he's fast!" That was Mousse.

Suddenly, Ukyou all but screamed, "Grenade!"

A heartbeat later, Ranma's personal armor blared a proximity alert warning, indicting the detection of an incoming known explosive device. That warning didn't make it easier to see where the grenade was, not in such a short span of time, so he fell to the ground and covered his head. In the corner of his vision, he saw Ukyou doing shielding herself with her giant spatula, a technique she had learned while training with India Squad.

The grenade went off on the opposite side of the wall. It was much more powerful than a conventional human grenade, like the M61 or Mk3A2, and even going off five meters from the wall, it served to demolish the cover. Bits of blasted stone flew through the air, with a large piece hitting the ground with a thud right next to Ranma's left arm. Quickly rolling aside, Ranma moved into a crouch and back under what was left of the wall. A second later, the aliens opened fire again, plasma blasts tearing into the ground.

Leaning out just enough to get a good line of sight on his enemy, Ranma shouldered his T7A2 laser rifle and snapped off a trio of shots. It was dark, but his Personal Armor's built in sensors included advanced night vision equipment. The world was awash in shades of green, but amid the confusion, there was some electronic assistance. The suit integrated computer could recognize motion of sufficient dimensions (typically man-sized), and highlight that object on his HUD. A beam of bright white reached out across the battlefield, just missing the ducking alien, cutting a hot red scar into the concrete wall of the villa.

Ranma quickly ducked back behind cover, as more return fire peppered the area. The sound of the alien plasma weapons was very different than that of his laser rifle, so he could tell just by hearing when Ukyou took a few shots of her own. These Snakemen were giving them a tough time – normally this would be the point where high explosives were used, but the presence of human hostages (and one of them a member of the Japanese Cabinet, no less) meant that just wasn't an option. Even an auto cannon raised the possibility of killing someone inside the building, so a M-144 missile was totally out of the question.

Then, to his surprised delight, the screech of a wounded (or maybe killed) alien filled the air.

"Shampoo to Squad leader," the Amazon's voice was now cool and steady. "In position. Attacking."

Ranma ventured to take a few shots of his own, while the aliens scurried to find cover. Shampoo was using a heavy laser rifle, the T-8A1, which could project a 1.3mm diameter laser beam over an effective distance of two kilometers. Shampoo was still the best shot in both teams when she wasn't being rushed or harried, a product of having learned to use a rifle for hunting when she was younger. She was putting that old training, and the new indoctrination she had received at Seiran, to good effect.

He saw her beam fill the air. One moment there was nothing and the next there was a solid line. She obviously had the tracer on to gauge the dwell point of the beam as she raked it across a target. Unfortunately, it also gave away her position. There was no scream that time, but Ranma still saw movement, and he and Ukyou took aim and fired, leaving burning furrows in the villa walls. The Snakeman kept low, however, and slithered back into the house and out of view.

"Shampoo!" Ranma called over the intercom. "How many?"

"Two tangos down," she confirmed. "I'm moving. There's one in a window and he sees me."

"They're falling back!" Ryouga's voice was tense, and hinted at his perpetual anger towards the xenos. "Now! Now!"

"Got 'im!" That was Mousse, sounding more excited than usual. "Tango down!"

"Roof!" Ryu yelled. "Roof! Get down!"

Ranma motioned to Ukyou to get up and cover him as he advanced. He was tempted to try and _Umisenken_, but his blood was running pretty hot, and he wasn't sure how effective it would be. The technique affected the perception of those nearby, including any teammates, but tests showed that he still gave off heat. He'd show up on an infrared sensor (just like he's show up on a motion sensor), and Snakemen, like certain Earth snakes, had a natural ability to sense the strength and distance of a heat source.

The building up ahead was two stories high, built in the style of the old Shushō Kantei (or Prime Minister's mansion). There was a courtyard in the middle of the building, facing the curved driveway, and the house itself surrounded the courtyard on three sides, like a big C. According to schematics Intel had provided them (real spur of the moment, too; those boys worked _fast_), there were five entrances on the first floor. One on each side of the building where the courtyard merged into the front lawn, one at the far side of the courtyard leading to the sitting room facing the courtyard, one in the kitchen immediately north of the sitting room facing the back yard, and another in the reading room immediately south of the sitting room, also facing the back yard and the pool there.

"I'm clearing the roof! Heads up!" Ryouga yelled, alerting everyone to a thrown friendly grenade. A second later, a smaller explosion came from the top of the building – a HG85 AP Frag grenade. Seiran had stocks of both it and the M61, but HG85s were preferred for this mission because of the smaller kill radius. Again, the hostages had hamstrung their assault options. Ranma disliked the grenades intensely himself. They seemed so… cheap a way of killing someone.

At that thought, his suit warned him again of an incoming explosive device.

Falling onto his back, and knowing it came from above, Ranma placed both of his palms upward and concentrated. It was just like knocking back a _Happodaikarin_, just like dealing with one of Happosai's stupid firecracker bombs, he reminded himself. He could do it! The _ki_ of his confidence ignited between his fingers and took form under his mental command before escaping as a tide upwards.

"Moko Takabisha!"

The _ki _blast engulfed the alien grenade and the concussive force threw it up and into the air, where it exploded a second and a half later. Ukyou, meanwhile, seemed to have gotten a bead on the elusive alien lurking on the roof. She was firing at it desperately, laser beams raking savagely back and forth over the rooftop. On the third shot she was awarded with a screech like a bat's.

"Tango down!" Ukyou announced, and then seemed to think twice about it. "He's wounded, if not dead."

"Let's find out," Ranma replied, and flipped back onto his feet. Like the rest of the Nerima Crew (well, except Kuno), he had an option that wasn't available to most soldiers just wearing personal armor. Flexing powerful leg muscles, and equally powerful _ki_, Ranma broke into a short run and jumped. For comparative purposes, it could be pointed out that while the average vertical jump height for a skilled volleyball player was roughly 2.8 feet, Ranma in a single bound easily cleared two stories. It was his innate telekinetic and psionic power that allowed such a feat, the same essential mechanism that allowed an Ethereal to float or "physically" lift many times its own weight.

Landing on the roof, Ranma quickly brought his rifle up to shoulder level. "I'm on the roof. Check your fire."

Nearby, a Snakeman writhed, wounded but not dead, making a faint hissing sound. Ukyou had hit it, cutting the alien's right arm clean off. It occurred to Ranma then that the burned stump at its shoulder was what was making the noise. Snakemen had unusual muscle and cardiovascular systems that used the hydraulic principle to give them power. Air was literally being forced out of the severed and mostly cauterized muscle.

It was an inhuman creature, especially this close up. There were no legs, just a long snake-like foot. Ranma had seen a drawing of a snake woman once, something Hiroshi had gotten from some online manga or card game or something, and the body shape was similar to that. At some point midway up the torso, the snake-like foot became replaced by a humanoid chest with shoulders and muscular arms ending in four fingered hands. The skin was a pale orange, and up close, Ranma could see that it was smooth and scaly. The head and face resembled a skull with the skin pulled back taut, a cluster of teeth met in the center of the jaws, giving the appearance of smile or a grimace, depending on the angle. The eyes were set in sockets lined with red scales, but the pupils were the color of bright purple.

The alien reached for its fallen plasma rifle with its remaining arm.

Ranma took careful aim, but found himself hesitating just a bit. Ryouga had killed wounded aliens before, and the lost boy had never seemed to regret the act. Given the weapon he, or it (since Snakemen were asexual) used, it was just a soldier. Command had said that there was some benefit in taking a medic or engineer alive, but a common soldier would just be executed. Space in Alien Containment cost money, after all. If he stunned the creature here and now, most likely Ryouga would kill it himself once the mission was over, or he would order someone else to do the deed.

The alien had just brushed its fingers against its lost plasma rifle when a bright light entered its skull and ended its life.

"Saotome!" That was Kuno. "Do you need assistance?"

"No," Ranma replied, hoping he sounded as indifferent and cool as he wanted to actually feel. "Tango is down."


	44. Snake Hunter II

Mousse swept out his hand, motioning for the rest of India Squad to stop. They were divided into two man units: Ryouga and Kuno were sweeping around to clear the northern face of the property, up to where the UFO had landed, while Mousse and Ryu were tasked to make an initial entry into the house, along with Ranma and Ukyou. When necessary, Ryouga and Kuno would enter via one of the balconies. Shampoo and Konatsu were best suited to covering the open spaces behind the house.

The Chinese martial artist had just been about to peek into the kitchen through a window on the first floor when he saw a blip register on the motion scanner attached to his laser carbine. Every primary weapon had an attached motion sensor, and smart linked together they formed the Platoon Advance Warning System (or PAWS). It was all part of a coordinated data collection system spread out over both Squads designed to give each individual soldier as much information as possible about the location and disposition of the enemy.

At the moment, that system was warning him about the alien waiting in the kitchen area of the villa, no doubt waiting for someone to stroll past the window or enter through the door. Mousse knew he didn't look it, but he was carrying the most gear of anyone on either of the two squads; his mastery of Hidden Weapons made him a veritable walking arsenal. That said it took only a second to reach into one of the folds of his robe and retrieve a XM84 Diversionary Flashbang.

The window shattered as he threw the grenade right through it, whereupon it hit the ceiling, bounced off a number of neatly arranged pots and pans, and exploded several feet in the air filling the kitchen with blinding light and deafening sound. While flashbangs were not as effective against most sorts of alien as they were against humans, this particular Snakeman happened to be right next to the grenade when it went off. 180 decibels of sound and over one million candlepower were more than enough to stun the creature, and a second later its top half became neatly separated from its bottom.

Facing into the kitchen from the smashed window, Mousse scanned the inside down the iron sights of his rifle, keeping the display terminal of the attached motion sensor at the bottom of his line of sight. If anything came rushing into the room, he'd have ample time to register the incoming movement and its direction. With the room devoid of any apparent hostiles, he nodded imperceptibly to himself.

"Tango down. Kitchen is clear," he said, a little cautiously. "No movement."

"Hold position," Ryouga's orders were punctuated by a muted curse. "There's at least one alien still guarding the UFO. Juliet Squad - status?"

Ukyou replied first. "In position."

"Southern face is clear." Shampoo.

"No activity in the southeast." That was Konatsu. "I'm circling around to the pool area."

"We're ready," Ranma confirmed. "There isn't much time left on the clock."

"Ryu and I are ready," Mousse said, not needing to look in his teammate's direction to know he was poised to pounce like a jungle cat.

"Alright. Remember the timing," Ranma reminded them. "We'll breech in ten."

Mousse began the count down in his head. In ten seconds, Ranma and Ukyou would enter the house through the southwest balcony. There was an attached bedroom there, and possibly one of the human hostages. From there they would head down the stairs, clear out one of the first floor bathrooms and two storage areas while approaching the reading room from behind. Around that time, Mousse and Ryu would enter to reinforce them. Hitting the rooms from both approaches would prevent a potentially deadly alien ambush.

In the meantime, there was nothing to do but count down, watch the scopes, listen to the radio chatter, and wait. He heard the distant sound of gunfire from behind, where Kuno and Ryouga were keeping the aliens guarding the UFO under close watch. The alien ship itself was still in perfect working order, and if it started to take off and bug out, then it would be up to the Lightning fighter/transporter they had arrived in to shoot it down. Near Ground Level Intercepts were generally frowned on, as any misses would literally tear apart the landscape nearby. XCOM air to air missiles were all armed with tactical nukes, and ship-mounted plasma weapons were of the same level of potency. Fusion Balls were directed explosions of incredible magnitude, but they weren't safe to fire off near the ground either.

"Ryu, PDM!" Ryouga growled. "We're mining the ships' entrance."

"Right!"

Mousse found himself agreeing with the decision. PDMs, or M86 Pursuit-Deterrent Munitions were also known as Proximity-Detonated Mines. One or two thrown at the single functional airlock of the landed UFO would bottle up the aliens inside pretty well. It would also kill off any troublemaking alien that was too fond of peeking out through an open doorway to get a cheap shot or two.

"Tango!" Ukyou's shout interrupted his thoughts.

"Got 'im!" Ranma answered, and Mousse could imagine the two of them clearing the rooms. Ukyou would be acting as cover, using her large exotic alloy spatula as an additional layer of protection from alien fire, while Ranma quickly checked the rooms they had to secure.

"We found one of the hostages," Ranma continued, sounding hurried. "A woman. Early twenties. Unconscious."

That would have had to be Minister Somei's youngest daughter, one of the three hostages believed by Intel to be in the building (aside from the contingent of guards). The others being the Minister's wife, and the man himself.

"Now!" Mousse barked, reaching the end of his countdown. As one, he and Ryu kicked in doors two and three, flashbang grenades already leading the way into the kitchen and reading room respectively. Immediately, he saw a flare of light and tried to cover himself with his rifle as he spun back and out of the doorway. Splashes of plasma burned clean through the wall to his left and right, disintegrating the brick and glass nearby and turning the aluminum in the door into a fountain of molten metal.

"Tango!" Ryu yelled, his voice already nearly drowned out by the whine of cutting lasers. Mousse barely heard it. He had managed to escape the worst of the first barrage, but another shot had hit the wall, gone right through it, and struck him clean in the lower left chest. Any other soldier in the world would have been cored – a basketball sized hole burned from one side of the torso to the other – if not instantly cremated. Fortunately, once again XCOM personal armor had proved its worth… assisted in this by Mousse's own special hidden weapons techniques and the metal wrapped around his body.

On impact, the alien plasma blast first encountered a coil of alien alloy wrapped around Mousse's abdomen. Burning through that, what was left hit a .22-inch thick alien alloy plate. The dispersed thermal energy was then blocked by a layer of special heat-resistant areogel that hardened instantly on exposure to atmosphere. A complex weave of conductors and coolant fluids within that layer helped to dampen what would otherwise have been a plasma inferno hotter than the sun. For a second, Mousse felt like his body had been pressed against an oven, and then the heat was gone – dissipated.

WARNING: plasma impact detected

MEDICAL ALERT!

He ignored the little diagram that popped up in the lower left corner of his helmet HUD. The wound on his torso wasn't bad, but there'd also been some serious damage to his armor both there, and to the armor around his right forearm. Luckily there hadn't been any penetration there, and he didn't feel any pain in his arm or hand. His robes had been mauled, but they were made of fire resistant Nomex nylon, so there wasn't any danger of them catching fire.

Scrambling along the outside wall of the living room, Mousse brought his rifle back up to his shoulder and tried to get a bead on what had hit him. He was too late, however; Ryu, Ranma and Ukyou had beaten him to the target. Or targets, actually. Two of the Snakeman type aliens had been lying in wait, silent and unmoving, waiting for him to enter the room. The moment he'd thrown his flashbang into the doorway, they had opened fire in his general direction, counting on the over penetration of their plasma rifles to hit him through the wall and door.

Both were dead now.

One of the aliens lay slumped behind an overturned couch, both it and the furniture having been sliced cleanly in half from top to bottom. Another Snakeman had cleverly backed itself into the fireplace, having also stacked up two chairs to give it more cover to fire behind. Both chairs were on fire now, and what was left of the alien was also slowly burning in the fireplace, having been nearly diced by three sets of slicing laser beams. A few seconds later, the house smoke alarm went off, and a sprinkler head built into the ceiling started to liberally rain water down on the heads of the three XCOM soldiers.

Stepping through the ruined threshold of the door he had tried to go through just a few seconds earlier, Mousse took in the sight of the place.

"You ok, man?" Ranma asked. Mousse was still used to associating the pigtailed fighter's voice with his unarmored self, and it was still somewhat strange to see Ranma so thoroughly concealed by matte black personal armor. He and Ryu and Ukyou looked nearly alike, except for Ukyou having her giant spatula and Ryu wearing a white band around his arm.

"I'm fine," Mousse assured Juliet's Squad's leader.

"Two tangos down," Ukyou confirmed for those not present but listening over the group intercom. "The south side of the house is clear."

They were about to move onto the rest of the house, when the glass and metal frame of the living room facing the courtyard exploded inward. Shards of crystal filled the air, and would have surely savaged any unprotected human (or alien) in the room. Without a word, without prompting, all four soldiers ducked down and took cover. One of the aliens had exited the house from the northernmost door facing the courtyard, and was now opening up on them at full auto.

In seconds, it became a full fledged counter attack.

An explosion near the UFO, and the sounds of Kuno and Ryouga as they opened fire made it clear that the aliens were trying to take the offensive again. Whatever was going on near the landed alien ship was obviously pretty brutal, as one and then two large explosions followed, probably as the two parties exchanged more grenades. Mousse ducked low as a plasma blast hit the large plasma TV he had knocked over and taken cover behind. It instantly went up like a microwave filled with silverware.

They were under fire from two aliens now, one at the other end of the courtyard and another coming around from where the kitchen connected to the northern one third of the house. Both were sticking under cover and firing wildly, three shots, three shots, duck, three shots, three shots… More experienced XCOM operatives would have had more luck picking the aliens off, but gun duels weren't what either India or Juliet Squads were geared (or trained) for.

"Mousse!" Ukyou prompted.

"Ryu!" Ranma did the same.

No more needed to be said. On an almost instinctive, almost telepathic level, they had a grasp of what the other fighters were planning. It was nearly impossible to understand or explain, the sort of parallel synthesis of comprehension that martial artists who had fought against each other, and fought side by side with each other, many times before in life or death duels gained. It was most obvious when one watched Ryouga and Ranma fight a common foe, but to some extent, they all understood how their peers fought, and through that, how they thought.

Mousse didn't know it, but the aliens would have understood it perfectly.

"Combination attacks!" Ranma rolled out from behind his cover, and he and Ryu stood back to back, facing the alien across the courtyard. Mousse meanwhile leapt out, spun around behind the protection of Ukyou's battle spatula, and tucked his hands into his sleeves.

"Kijin Dai Ran Bu!" (Demon God Big Mad Dance!)

"Hiryu Shoten Ha!" (Rising Dragon Heaven Blast!)

"Kenran Hinode!" (Brilliant Sunrise!)

"Karasu Sansai Ha!" (Raven Storm Wave!)

Four special techniques were executed in the same split second. Ryu's vacuum blades joined Ranma's horizontal tornado, channeling the deadly projectiles into a funnel shaped spiral of doom. The courtyard, stones and trees and bushes, was instantly turned into a giant chopped salad as a long shallow trench tore into the ground. The alien, sensing danger the moment the humans jumped out of cover, ducked behind the concrete wall of the house and the metal and wood frame of the door. A second later, both ceased to be. The twisting helix of vacuum blades neatly removed a circular section of the first and second floor of the house – the alien stood amid the ruined masonry for just a moment before the first few blades bisected it, and then trisected it, and then eviscerated it into a handful of pieces.

Inside the kitchen, meanwhile, the second alien wailed as a halo of light engulfed it. Ukyou's _ki_ attack was far more thermal in nature than Ranma or Ryouga's emotion based techniques, which were primarily concussive, and even the Snakeman's resilient hide blistered under the heat. Blinded and stunned, it never saw the wave of killer flechettes heading its way. A heartbeat later it was impaled in a hundred ways and stapled to the wall behind it.

"I saw from here!" Shampoo interrupted, filling in that exhilarated moment of silence after the execution of a good special technique. "Great job, Ranma! You really are worthy of an Amazon bride!"

From where he stood next to her, Mousse could all but see Ukyou's expression turn dark even behind her helmet and facemask. Ryu didn't give any outward appearance of annoyance that Ranma had gotten all the credit, but Mousse himself was secretly a bit annoyed. True, his and Ukyou's combined technique hadn't been as flashy as Ranma and Ryu's, but still…! Why did Shampoo always have to fawn on Ranma?

"Two tangos down." Ryu remained professional, and all four quickly got back to being focused on the duty at hand. Ranma patted him on the back by way of thanks, both for the technique and for the reminder.

"Let's move!" Juliet Squad's Lieutenant barked, and all four advanced into the northern part of the villa. Ukyou and Ranma took point, and they quickly passed by a furnished but empty guest bedroom and a large bathroom. At the extreme northwest of the house was a flight of stairs leading up, and one leading down into the cellar. Ranma quickly motioned for Ryu and Mousse to handle the basement while he and Ukyou went upstairs.

"This is India Squad Leader," Ryouga spoke up, then. "We've taken down one tango, and we're headed into the UFO after the second. Its wounded, and probably trying to start the engines."

"Roger that." Ranma replied, leading Ukyou carefully up the stairs. "Be careful in there."

"You, too."

At the top of the stairs, Ranma held up his hand, and he paused. There was movement up ahead in the master bedroom, though it was impossible to tell if it was human or alien. He showed Ukyou three fingers and pointed at the door. She nodded. Squeezing the hilt of her battle spatula, the heavy pommel detached and dangled several inches from a thin cord.

Ukyou spun around once, to build momentum, before snapping her weapon to the side and sending the pommel crashing into the handle of the door. The force was sufficient to knock the door open about half way, and the second it did, plasma fire erupted from behind it. In such confined quarters there was little that could be done to avoid the bursts of white hot death. Luckily, Ukyou had already taken refuge behind the wide flat face of her main weapon, and was already in a crouch with her rifle leveled and about to return fire.

"Hold your fire!" He reminded her, and jumped forward, biting his lip as a plasma blast passed right by his left shoulder. They couldn't risk firing blindly into the bedroom when one or both remaining hostages could be inside. Kicking the door off its hinges and pivoting on the ball of his right foot, Ranma let his rifle leave his hands and swing back and out of the way. He instantly took in the scene: a woman on the floor next to the bed, dead or unconscious, two identical men on the bed, both sitting upright at the edge. On the left side of the room was another Snakeman, busy trying to knocking the door out of its way, and on the right was a startled looking Sectoid.

The Sectoid could have some psi powers, but for the most part, the biggest threat was the Snakeman. Ranma decided to leave the secondary threat to Ukyou, who would be right on his heels, and concentrate on the primary danger. By the time the Snakeman had started to nudge the door out of its line of sight, Ranma was up close and personal. The alien tried, desperately, to get the weapon up and on target, but Ranma quickly grabbed the plasma rifle just above the grip, and twisted, breaking the alien's wrist with an audible crack. He then introduced his armored elbow to the creature's face, shattering its teeth and sending it sprawling.

The Snakeman was beaten, but not down, and it tried valiantly to fight back with its left arm. It had a hand with three claws probably well suited to raking flesh, but what it hoped to achieve against the personal armor Ranma wore, he couldn't imagine. With a single smooth move, Ranma unclipped the stun baton strapped to his right leg, and plunged the crackling electrical end into the Snakeman's gut. Its body shook for a second and collapsed.

Behind him, Ranma heard a similar fate befall the Sectoid.

"Upper floor is clear," Ranma announced with a deep sigh of relief. "Two tangos down but still breathing. Hostages recovered. Status?"

"This is Mousse. The cellar looks clear. Found two more unconscious guards."

"Everything looks clear out here, Saotome-taichou."

"The ship is secure. There was only one tango left inside, and Kuno finished it off."

"Good. Good!" Ranma then turned to the two identical Ministers of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. One was naked, the other still in his night clothes. There seemed to be some sort of apparatus attached to the side of their skulls, in roughly the same spot. Ranma approached, getting a closer look at the alien duplicate. Really: it was uncanny.

"Kinda creepy, seeing that they can do that," Ukyou said, standing next to him. "I mean, if they could replace someone in the Cabinet… where would it stop? The Prime Minister? The Emperor himself?"

"That's why we're here," Ranma replied, not very comfortable with where Ukyou's line of thought led. He wasn't the paranoid type by nature, but if aliens could just pull a replacement job like this, then he could see why some people would be.

"Ah, Lieutenant," Ukyou then asked, using his formal title now that the heat of combat was slowly fading from their thoughts. "Which Minister Somei is the real one?"

"The one wearing clothes, I'd assume…" Ranma frowned at that. "Unless they already got the clone dressed. One way to find out, though."

Ukyou then leaned over and gently poked the naked version in the chest with her index finger. When he didn't move, or give any indication of a response, she tried again. After two more pokes, he teetered and fell backwards onto the bed, where he started to drool.

"Would you please stop that?" Ranma sighed, and reached behind him and into his haversack, eventually retrieving a large circular object. Ukyou recognized it after only a moment.

"A mind probe!"

Ryouga obviously heard her.

"You better be careful using that, Ranma," he warned, sounding much like he was in the room instead of a half mile away inside an alien UFO.

"Relax!" the pigtailed boy assured his friends. "I read the instructions! I know what I'm doing!"

Ukyou cautiously took a step back.

"Let's see…" Ranma held up the mind probe, and fished around for a small tag clipped to the underside. "Okay. 'The mind probe is an alien communication device which is used to take information directly from brain waves…' Here's what we want: step one, turn unit on."

He activated a small switch, and the mind probe began to ominously hum.

Ukyou took another step back.

"Step two," Ranma read off from the tag. "Identify subject. That's easy, he's right here! Step three; 'conceptualize the existence of the mental probe.' Hmm… Ah! Here we go!"

Along the outer rim of the mind probe, a line of dull green began to glow.

"Are you interfaced with the mind probe?" he read, and then answered. "Yes, I am. Do you see the display? Yes, I do."

"Now, for basic information gathering when in sight of the target," he continued, oblivious to the odd stare Ukyou was giving him. "'Click on the mind probe and the 'use' option. Then click on an alien with the cursor.' Sounds pretty easy. Warning, do not use on conscious human beings, side effects may include headache, nausea and/or disorientation. See documentation for details."

"'Use' option?" Ukyou asked, incredulous. "Cursor?"

"It's just like a video game!" Ranma assured her, and then focused on the man in front of him (that is: the one with clothes on). In his mind, a little white cursor moved over the Minister and then a gold box appeared around the older man. Prompting the device to activate, two options appeared in front of him: "use" and "cancel."

Ranma selected "use."

Instantly, a wave of surface thoughts coagulated into a short burst of information which the mind probe quickly sorted, organized, and presented. The most important aspect of the information shown was a number representing alien influenced thought mind waves compared to baseline human ones. Highlighting and doing the same query for the naked version of the Minister revealed much the same physical information. The differences were solely in surface thought processes (the naked one had none whatsoever), and the alien influence index (one being at near zero and the other being over eighty percent).

"Ranma? … Lieutenant?"

He quickly shook his head to clear his thoughts, and the information disappeared. He couldn't even remember most of it, now that his mental connection to the probe had broken. The whole experience had actually been rather strange, now that he thought about it. Next time, for sure, he'd _really_ have to read the manual and not just browse through it.

"Mister birthday suit over there is a blank slate," Ranma said, pointing to the naked old man with his thumb. "They didn't finish copying the original's memories."

"So what do we do with it? Or him?" Ukyou asked, kneeling next to the still unconscious man's wife. She seemed unhurt, and Ranma was briefly tempted to mind scan her, too. The more he thought about it, the safer he would feel just making sure. It wasn't like he was paranoid or anything, just playing it safe. The Commander would be happier knowing he'd done a thorough job.

"I dunno. That's not our department." He took out the mind probe a second time, and quickly used it on the man's wife. The surface scan for alien influence came back negative.

"Everything ok up there?" Ryu asked, standing at the bottom of the stairs.

"I think this is a wrap," Ranma concluded. "Let's secure the area for the cleanup crew. Juliet Squad will handle the house; India can take the outside and the UFO."

"Ah, the fun part of every mission…" Mousse griped.

"I'm with ya on that," Ukyou seconded, hefting the unconscious Sectoid under her arm and heading towards the Snakeman. "Dibs on the non-leaking live ones."

Watching her leave, Ranma walked over to where the Cabinet Minister, one of the most powerful men in Japan, sat limp and unmoving. Holding the man's jaw, Ranma craned the older man's neck, and looked closely at the small alien device dug into the side of his head. One of the clean up techs would know what to do with it, and if it was safe to remove.

As for what the aliens had wanted with this man, it was a mystery as far as he knew. But whatever their plans, XCOM would thwart them, as often as necessary. Picking up the man's wife and gently laying her down on the bed next to her husband's doppelganger, Ranma waited in the room, watching over them until the clean up crew drove up to the damaged country villa.

Elsewhere, the battle was not going as smoothly.


	45. Snake Hunter III

It was Shirokuro who led her up the stairs and into the room looking out into the base's main Hangar. Mitsuko, since getting the Hibiki curse, had quickly learned to trust in the ever faithful family of canines of which Shirokuro was a member. The black and white colored dog seemed to be trying to manage time between Ryouga and her, and unexpectedly it appeared that she was giving preference to the son over the mother.

Did Shirokuro somehow sense that Ryouga's work here was more important?

Holding onto the dog's collar, Mitsuko felt her pull towards a small group of people. If she lost hold of Shirokuro now, it was without question that's she'd be lost in the maze of corridors and walkways and rooms that was this strange military base. Shirokuro looked back at her, and kept pulling, insistent on heading towards the three people. Mitsuko recognized one of them: Kounji Kazuo, who she had met before on the flight to Seiran Mountain. The other two were unknown.

Together, they four (and one dog) were the only people in the small observer room. The base was in a state of alert, and from the announcements made over the base intercom, it seemed that there was some sort of emergency that had called "combat teams" away on duty. That meant that Ryouga was gone, too.

To her regret, they hadn't really spoken like mother and son when they had met on the base, or before that back in Osaka. There was so much she wanted to ask him about, to learn about her son, but when the chance actually presented itself, she found it hard to actually give voice to her concerns. When he was a child, she'd nearly had a heart attack when he'd gotten lost for days at a time. Now, even knowing abstractly that he was going off to fight some sort of evil creatures from another world, she found plenty of worry, but not the same crushing grief.

She hadn't had to think about it in years, but she wondered often now if that made her a terrible mother.

It was in the middle of that thought when a blaring alarm claxon sounded, and red and white lights flashed beyond the transparent blast shield that separated the room from the Hangar. Looking through, she could easily see many people in the vast space – engineers moving machinery and gesturing away from a large area. Past the activity, one of the Hangar doors opened wide, like a gaping mouth, separating in both a horizontal and vertical direction.

"Warning! Intense Gravitic Turbulence! Warning! Firestorm Landing Procedures are in effect!"

The room's two heavy doors were both hanging open and unsealed, and Mitsuko could hear voices coming from both sides of the place. To her right, near the group of people, she could hear the voices coming from people inside the Hangar. To her left was a small flight of stairs, and what looked like a control room of sorts, judging by the blinking lights and faint glow.

"Observer to Hangar Deck, Firestorm Two is on approach!" Mitsuko heard the voices come from the room past the stairs. They were all in English, like everything here was, but that wasn't a problem for her. She'd spent three years in the States, and she already spoke and wrote English fluently.

"ETA: 24 seconds, 28 miles. Landing Pad Two is clear!"

"She's coming in hot!"

"Routing emergency response team!"

"Alpha Two isn't responding. Thank God for the autopilot…"

Mitsuko was amazed by the implications of what had just been said: a plane was coming in to land at more than a mile a second? It had to be one of those strange saucer shaped craft she had seen yesterday. But was there was a problem with it? Drawing closer to the small group with Kazuo in it, she was about to introduce herself and ask what they were doing and if they knew what was happening, when the automated intercom voice began a countdown.

"Landing in Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three…"

It was only at "three" that a bright little speck of light became visible far outside the Hangar doors. In was moving at an incredible speed, even now, and in the blink of an eye it was just outside the doors. It was one of the saucer shaped UFO-type craft, smooth and gray in color, but with a faintly glowing concave area underneath, and a flat silvery dome rounding out the top. This one also had a scar marring its otherwise perfect surface – a jagged line of red and orange, like molten lead, ran across it on one side.

Still, despite the wound it moved gracefully and with eerie ease, gliding into the Hangar much more slowly that it had approached it. By the end of the countdown it had settled above an area marked by crossing warning lines of striped yellow and black. Part of the underside of the surface of the UFO shifted, or morphed, forming prongs that attached themselves to mechanical clasps that rose out of the floor. Above the landing man-made UFO, two mechanical arms lowered, and began to hose down the craft with white foam.

"Landing successful. Gravitation levels nominal." The voice that Mitsuko identified as (almost certainly) synthetic announced. "Radiation levels nominal. De Winter Barrier off line."

Immediately, men in bright orange protective full body suits ran towards the damaged Firestorm. They turned a hose on the ship, washing away some of the thick foam, while others quickly rolled a ladder and platform up to the saucer. They were yelling, but their voices weren't clear, muffled by distance and the transparent wall. With the ladder up against the landed ship, one of the men climbed it and tried to move something attached to the aircraft. Struggling visibly, he began to yell over his shoulder.

"It's jammed!"

"…won't open!"

"…have to cut it!"

"…that plasma torch?"

Akane could clearly see as the chief hangar tech tried again to turn something built into the underside of the XCOM craft, just a foot or so from where the metal had been scarred by enemy fire. He obviously wasn't strong enough so they were going to cut through. To her, the most likely reason for the obvious hurry was because the pilot was injured in some way. If that was the case... she looked to her left, at Nodoka and Ukyou's father. He looked pretty strong, but no one there knew him.

Her mind quickly made up, Akane bolted for the open door leading to the Hangar area, grabbing two heavy work gloves hanging from the wall. The non-elevated part of the Observer area behind the transparent alien alloy blast shields was designed as a waiting area for pilots and maintenance personnel. As such, spare generic orange work clothes hung freely from hooks near the door in case anyone needed them. They were designed to be put on quickly over normal clothes, and in a few seconds she had slipped her legs in, and zipped up the torso section.

"Akane-chan?" Nodoka questioned, still standing next to Kazuo. For his part, he was watching with a little envy, probably wanting to go out and help as well, but held back by not really knowing if they would let a him interfere.

"Stay here, Auntie!" Akane pulled tight the straps around the wrist section of the gloves. "I'll be right back!"

Heading out the door and into the Hangar itself, Akane tried to think of just how she was going to convince the engineers around the ship to let her help, much less get close enough to try. Ranma would probably have just jumped across the room, landing on someone's head, and then done it without even asking first. A part of her would have liked the confidence and power to do that herself, but she knew how much behavior like that aggravated people. She would just have to be honest and hope.

Running towards the landed ship, she passed a man holding some sort of remote control. Above him was another large robotic arm mounted onto the railing built into the ceiling. He was obviously moving the arm into position near the landed ship from where it had been housed up against one of the walls, and Akane could see the massive plasma torch on its tip.

"Hey," the torch operator called, seeing her run part. "Who the hell…?"

She ignored him, and headed towards the ship.

"Let me try and open it!" She yelled as half the men and women there looked at her like she was some escaped mental patient. "I'm one of the martial artists! Let me try and help!"

"Somebody get her out of here!" A dark haired man yelled, and tapped the combination headset he wore over his ears. "Control, security team to landing pad two!"

The other engineers looked between themselves and muttered.

"Let me try, please!" Akane pleaded, directing the question at the man who had been struggling to open the landed ship's hatch. Nearby, the robotic arm with the plasma cutter came silently to a stop, and started to maneuver itself into position to cut into the ship. Finally, the brown haired Caucasian man near the hatch sighed and motioned her over.

"One of those martial artists, huh?" he asked, as she ran up the steps towards him.

"Sir!" the black haired man from before started to object.

"It won't hurt to let her try," the foreman cut him off. With Akane next to him, and with her already suited up, he nodded and pointed to the hatch built into the Firestorm. For the first time, Akane got a good look at it. There was a circular handle of sorts, and the man had already tried using a metal bar for better leverage.

"There are two magnetic seals," he quickly explained. "You need a quarter turn clockwise, pull out, then a quarter turn clockwise again, then press down. Got it?"

"Got it!" Akane replied and, taking a deep breath, she got a good grip on the metal rod wedged into the handle, and began to try and turn it clockwise. Struggling, she could see why the foreman had been having so much trouble. Gritting her teeth and squeezing her eyes shut, she braced her feet against a nearby strut and kept up the pressure. She could feel her confidence in herself waver as doubt, then insecurity, then embarrassment began to rise up in her mind.

'No!' she hissed to herself. 'I can DO this!'

With a high pitched whine and a hiss of steam, the first seal broke as the handle rotated the full ninety degrees. Quickly, she pulled out on the metal bar until she felt the handle shift and lock into a new position, and then she started again. The second seal was as difficult to overcome as the first, even straining with all her strength and with the metal rod as leverage.

'As strong as an ape!' Ranma had quipped often enough to that effect over the years. 'An' built like one too!' he'd also been keen to add. The memory of those words brought a fresh jolt of adrenalin to her fatigued muscles. She had always been proud of her physical strength, preferring to put her faith in a single powerful strike to down an opponent rather than whittle away at them as was Ranma's habit. With a strained cry, she finally rotated the bar the last ninety degrees, and pushed it back in.

With a metallic hiss, like cooling steel in water, lines appeared in the formerly seamless alien alloy hull. The hatch retracted and retreated, releasing a gust of hot air. Akane stepped back, breathing heavily from exhaustion, while the foreman nudged past her and stepped halfway inside the ship. For a short while, no one said anything, as everyone present simply waited. Then the foreman backed out, carrying in his arms the limp body of the ship's pilot.

"He's alive!" The foreman yelled, looking over his shoulder at them. "But he needs medical attention!"

Cries and sighs of relief came from the work crew below, and Akane felt herself fill with pride and simultaneous relief. She remembered breaking out of Taro's bindings to help Ranma in his fight against the monster cursed martial artist. That was really why she had trained to become strong for: to help those she cared about! Those important to her! And while she didn't know this man, this pilot, getting him out of there had made her feel better about herself than she had in a long time.

Without another word, Akane helped the foreman by picking up the pilot's legs as they carried him down the steps to where the EMT was already waiting. To her surprise, one of the medical techs was instantly recognizable: Kasumi. The two sisters exchanged glances, and then the pilot was on the stretcher and being wheeled away. Kasumi spared Akane a quick nod and smile before resuming her work.

"Good job, kid," Akane heard the foreman say from next to her. The other engineers and technicians also offered their appreciation, as a pat on the back, a word of thanks, or just a smile and a nod. Even the black haired man who had called for security slapped her on the shoulder.

"Now get outta here," the foreman continued, though his tone was still friendly. "We got work to do!"

Akane nodded, understanding.

Taking a more leisurely pace back to the observation room, she started to un-strap the work gloves, sparing one last look to her left at the doors where Kasumi and the pilot had disappeared to. Kasumi rarely talked about her work as a nurse, but Akane knew that her older sister would be the last person to openly complain about their work. She seemed content when the subject arose, and Akane had accepted that just as Kasumi wasn't naturally one to complain, she wasn't by nature likely to display her happiness openly either.

Having seen Kasumi, Akane briefly wondered how Nabiki was doing during the crisis. The middle Tendo had somehow secured a transfer from simple assistant accounting to some branch of the nebulous field of 'Intelligence.' When asked about her new work, Nabiki had simply (but with a big smile) referred to it as "tip top secret" but "always interesting." To an extent, Akane envied both her sisters for their versatility in being able to adapt to the situation, and she wondered when the chance would come for her to really prove herself in the field she had chosen to pursue.

Not bothering to remove the hazmat suit, Akane noticed (for the first time) the new comer in the observation room. She didn't recognize the woman, but knew immediately from hearsay (actually just Ranma) and the presence of Shirokuro that it had to be Ryouga's mother. Ranma hadn't told her too much about that mission, in terms of the classified specifics, but he had mentioned that this woman had given Mousse a good fight before turning herself in. Like Nodoka, she looked younger than she actually was, giving the appearance of a woman in her mid thirties and not forties.

Akane was about to approach her when Nodoka walked up to offer her approval.

"That was very bold, Akane-chan!" Ranma's mother spoke in Japanese, since she hadn't shown an interest in spending some time under the psi-knife. Akane suspected Nodoka was a little afraid or uncomfortable with the idea of a machine jamming information into her brain, and if she was, Akane couldn't really blame her for it. There were bound to be a lot of people in the years after the war who resisted that particular technology.

"You may have saved that man's life," Kazuo pointed out. "It's a good thing you were here."

Akane suspected Ukyou's father was as strong as she was, but she took the compliment for what it was at face value. After all, even though she had just met him for the first time earlier today, Kazuo seemed like a nice enough guy. In fact, he reminded her of Ukyou, in that sort of friendly-to-strangers-and-customers attitude. Plus, he had a scruffy and outgoing sort of personality, like a well traveled uncle.

"Thanks," Akane offered, not wanting to dwell in what she had done. She was much more curious now of Ryouga's mother. As if sensing she was being watched, and led on by Shirokuro (who Akane knew from back when she had puppies), Mitsuko slowly approached them.

"Hi there," she began, and smiled easily as she bowed her head in greeting. Shirokuro's welcome was less restrained, as she jumped up and tried to lick Akane's face. Akane caught the friendly dog by the paws, and ruffled the fur behind her ears.

"Allow me to make the introductions, ladies," Kazuo remarked with a boyish grin, obviously not one for standing on formality. He inclined his head to Nodoka, first. "Hibiki Mitsuko, this is Saotome Nodoka, the mother of _that Ranma boy_. And this is Tendo Akane. You've probably heard of her, too."

"Pleased to meet you," Nodoka spoke first, also bowing her head slightly. "Your Ryouga is my son's best friend."

"I've been hoping to meet you since I heard about your coming here." Akane chimed in.

"Thank you both," Mitsuko replied, and then addressed Kazuo. "And thank you, Kazuo." She then turned to Akane. "I've heard so much from my son about you, Akane. And about your boy, too, Nodoka. He must be quite the martial artist to so frustrate my Ryouga. I'm so happy he's found a good rival!"

Nodoka and Akane stared, speechless, at the sunny smile Mitsuko wore in combination with what she had just said. Kazuo just laughed jovially.

"Did I say something strange?" Mitsuko asked, and a second later she laughed nervously herself, one hand behind her head in a pose Akane remembered seeing Ryouga assuming many times before in the past.

"They are very good friends!" Akane cheerfully said, borrowing a phrase from Kasumi.

"A little manly competition is healthy between boys," Nodoka commented, taking advantage of the shift in conversation. "Ryouga is a very polite and dedicated young man. Did you know he was working here?"

"I had no idea until just a few days ago," Mitsuko replied, her mood turning just a bit. "It came as quite a surprise as you can imagine."

"I didn't hear from Ukyou, either, and she usually calls me once a week," Kazuo said with a sigh. "I guess they had to keep it under wraps. But you know, it turns out we've all met before. Back in 1979. This was when I first met Genma, too, during the Non-Stop Savage Battle Tournament."

Mitsuko remembered it well. "You mean that UNICEF Fundraiser?"

"That's the one!" Kazuo snapped his fingers, and explained for Akane's benefit, "Non Stop Savage Battle (for UNICEF) it was called. I was there selling Okonomiyaki, and challenging fighters to steal it from me, to test the strength of the Kounji Style. Mitsuko, you were there taking part in the women's division…"

"Until I got lost…" she grumbled.

"Yes, you had a chance for the top spot, too!" Kazuo shook his head, expressing his sympathy. "But Nodoka here was there, too."

"I don't remember her in the competition," Mitsuko said, facing Nodoka. "Were you?"

"Oh no," Nodoka replied, waving her hand demurely. "I wasn't there to fight... I was there to marry one of the finalists!"

"Hmm, probably a good thing Tetsuya didn't show up, then…" Ryouga's mother quietly mused.

"Wait!" Akane blurted out. "**That**'s how you met Mr. Saotome?"

"What better way to find a good man among men than a martial arts Tournament?" Nodoka asked aloud. A sweat drop lazily formed down the back of Akane's head – Genma had never really struck her as a 'man among men,' and Nodoka's story was just a bit too Shampoo-ish for her liking. At least **her** parents had met normally; falling in love and getting married after high school.

"In fact," Nodoka continued, undeterred by Akane's incredulous looks. "Our very first date was the day after the Tournament, when Genma took me to the IMAX and paid for dinner."

"Stole dinner is more like it," Kazuo interrupted. "Still, those were good times."

"We did raise a lot of money for a good cause," Mitsuko agreed. "I just wish I'd been there for the end. To this day, I regret having to forfeit my match with that annoying ninja girl… she probably went on to take first place, too. But I do think I remember this Genma: long black hair, right? Trying to grow a goatee? Kind of a pretty boy?"

"That was probably his friend Soun you're remembering," Nodoka said, and Akane grimaced at the thought of her father as a long haired teen. "My husband was the man wearing the white headscarf and glasses."

"Hmm, that guy…?" Mitsuko tried to remember, but really couldn't. Luckily for her, Akane choose that moment to slip back into the conversation.

"By the way, what style do you practice, Mrs. Hibiki?" Akane asked, hoping Nodoka wouldn't mind the interruption.

"Oh," she replied, quickly looking Akane over any trying to gauge how far she was along in the Art herself. "Well, my father taught me the Gojū-ryu karate that he learned as a boy. When I met Tetsuya, my husband, in college, he started to teach me some of the martial arts he'd developed. I guess by now you could call my style a mixture of that: a very technique dependant fusion of karate and weapons handling. You practice the 'Anything Goes' style, isn't that right?"

Akane nodded. "It's rooted in kenpo, but varies a lot from one practitioner to another…"

It was casual conversation, just breaking the ice and getting those often awkward introductions out of the way, but Akane was amazed by how smoothly it went, and the contrasts between her friends' parents. This was especially the case between Nodoka and Mitsuko. While they hadn't broached the subject, Akane suspected they both had some notion that they were similar in not seeing their respective children in years, and that both harbored doubts as to whether they could pick up, as mothers, where they had been forced to leave off.

The contrasts were as clear as their styles of dress. In the year or so Akane had known her, Nodoka had always dressed in a conservative kimono. Even here in Seiran, where she was the only one to dress that way, she never wavered in trying to maintain that old fashioned decorum. Nodoka was a kind and understanding woman, matronly even, and the seppuku promise aside, she reminded Akane a lot of her own mother. There was an obvious motherly and protective dignity to her… at least when she wasn't mishandling the family sword and talking about ritual suicide.

Mitsuko, in contrast, wore a hodgepodge of different articles of clothing. "From different adventures," she had said, offhand. Akane could imagine her perfectly at home with a pith helmet on and layered in stereotypical khaki, hacking through a jungle. It wasn't just that she was a Hibiki, either; she actually seemed to like the explorer aspect of getting chronically lost. She'd even made fun of it a few times when it had come up ("For our honeymoon, we went backpacking across the United States. We were _supposed_ to have spent the three weeks in Bermuda!"). Not that she was undignified, exactly, but the impression from her lifestyle was that it was too… unorthodox, in a way, to fit into Akane's ideal of a mother figure.

The two women were becoming fast friends, and Akane was glad for that. Nodoka was the most isolated out of all of them here in Seiran Mountain. She had her family whole again, after a decade of being essentially alone, but there was precious little to occupy her here. There were no other families on the base (Akane suspected one of the reasons they were really here was because they would stick out too much at one of the hidden Sanctuary Communities XCOM had set up), and Nodoka didn't have the pre-existing level of education to make her attractive in support roles, like with Kasumi and Nabiki. What she did all day, Akane couldn't imagine, but it could only be a good thing for her to find a friend she could relate to.

Occupied in conversation, the four of them waited for their loved ones to return.

Three hours later, the first of the wounded began to come in.

* * *

They called it Command and Control. 

Every soldier, every heavy weapons platform, every ship, every suit of armor and every weapon… all were tied into a great interconnected network. Through Command and Control, and given the right clearance, a commander could see the location of all active duty soldiers in any given area, as well as their physiological and combat status. Ranma and Ryouga, thanks to their upgraded security clearance, now had near full access to Command and Control.

They sat rigidly, side by side, and listened to the progress of the other squads' battles. They were all inside the Lightning as it streaked across the sky, covering a mile a second, but the inertia-less drive absconded from alien technology made it seem from the inside as if the ship wasn't moving at all. For those without access to the Command and Control network, the grim look on the faces of the two Special Lieutenants was all they needed to guess things weren't going smoothly.

Mousse grunted in discomfort as Konatsu helped to set his burns.

"Just another moment, please," the ninja boy said, wrapping another meter of gauze around the Chinese fighter's torso. The pain killers Mousse had applied to himself, using the standard UNETCO Medikit (or ATRISK, short for Automated Trauma Response and Internal Surgery Kit), had not only dulled the pain but had given a boost to his immune system, so he wasn't bad off. Once they got back to base, they'd affect some more permanent treatment, probably an artificial epithelial graft. Having taken off his armor, Mousse had been rather surprised by the extent of the injury.

Abstractly, he remembered that "Don't Get Hurt" video they'd been shown during training. Clear as day, he could remember some of the footage of people who'd been killed by plasma blasts: charred and scattered remains, burnt to the consistency of charcoal and blown apart by all the water in their bodies transitioning into steam… He hadn't really thought of himself as lucky when he'd been hit, but as painful as it now was, he'd gotten away with a literal cat scratch in comparison. It hadn't seemed like much at first, but a large section of his midriff more than twice the area of his hand had been burned pretty badly.

He gazed towards one of the Medkits hanging from the wall nearby.

The ATRISK or Medikit, was one of XCOM's most important tools. No substitute for proper medical care, its function was to keep an injured soldier conscious and alive long enough to survive combat and get back to base. Painkillers were an essential ingredient in that formula, and to that effect a Medikit could dispense a next generation "hypermorphine" capable of blocking pain receptors but providing no potentially adverse physical side effects such as euphoria or chemical addiction. Less extreme painkillers, introduced to the body via a jet injector, could block a person's ability to remember pain from moment to moment, while the use of targeted anti-inflammatory medicines could be used to treat pain only in affected areas.

At the moment, Mousse could feel those pain killers starting to wear off.

"There, done!" Konatsu announced, keeping up his sunny disposition. Mousse offered him a grateful look.

"Thanks."

"Stupid Mousse," Shampoo said, walking over after having been content to watch him get bandaged up. She was holding onto one of the overhead railings built into the ceiling, and like everyone else present, she had taken off her torso armor. This left her wearing just a cotton t-shirt. As always, the sight of her (on the occasion when he had his glasses on anyway) left Mousse momentarily breathless.

She really was beautiful.

"You always were too clumsy," she went on, accentuating the statement with a casual flick of her long violet hair. "When will you learn to be more careful?"

Mousse's first impulse was to say something to the effect of "Shampoo! You do care about me!" and then try and embrace her, but the lingering pain encircling his lower body and five years of past precedent in that not working cut him short. It wasn't unheard of for her to occasionally be nice to him, at which point he typically ended up ruining things by blowing them out of proportion. Hanging around with the others had forced him to realize something he had begun to understand back at Jusendo, when Shampoo had been controlled by Kiima.

She didn't love him.

Not **yet**, anyway.

But that could change. That **would **change! He had always sort of assumed that Shampoo's affection would be a mirror of his own, but he understood now that winning her over wouldn't be as straightforward as he assumed. Ranma seemed to have won over Akane over the last two years, and he'd seen how Ukyou had gained friends of her own over time. So Mousse restrained himself from doing anything that would earn a swift beat down, and instead offered the only woman he had ever loved a small smile.

"Maybe I was a little too aggressive," Mousse admitted, gently patting the white cloth around his stomach. "Those creatures were better than I expected."

Shampoo seemed to agree with this assessment. "They almost hit me a few times. If…"

She didn't voice that trail of thought, instead switching to another topic.

"Does it hurt much?" she asked, trying to sound casual about her curiosity.

Konatsu slipped away while Mousse and Shampoo talked, making his way to the opposite end of the interior of the ship to put back the Medikit he'd made use of. Kuno and Ukyou were there, the latter describing the combination technique she and Mousse had pulled off during the mission. Tatewaki actually seemed to be listening intently, and Konatsu guessed he had a strong interest in improving his own repertoire of moves. They seemed pretty friendly with one another, something that he attributed to their time training together as the two main melee weapons users in their respective squads.

Hanging up the Medikit, Konatsu looked around for the only other remaining member of Juliet and India Squads. He saw Ryu near the back of the Lightning. The Earth-built XCOM UFO was basically circular on the inside, and composed of one main room, but there were a few alcoves that branched off from it. One was the cockpit. Another was the alien containment cell.

Ryu was standing in front of that area, staring at one of its occupants.

"Ryu-san," Konatsu said in greeting, walking up to the man.

"Konatsu," he said in reply, giving the ninja a quick look before focusing again on the alien in lockup. "You know, you can call me Ryu if you want."

He then amended that by adding, "Our rank's the same after all."

"I'll do that." Konatsu was actually quite happy Ryu had offered to let him drop the 'san' and thus assume a more casual sort of relationship between them. From the beginning, when Ryu had mistaken Konatsu for a girl (as flattering as that had been), he sensed that they had gotten off on the wrong foot. Kuno had assumed he was a woman as well, but after giving found out the truth, the kendoist had almost seemed to have forgotten about the whole incident.

Ryu, on the other hand, had at times seemed somewhat hostile. Konatsu was no fool, and he strongly suspected the root of that dislike was his manner of appearance. While he didn't think of his own behavior as such, he knew cross-dressing wasn't exactly seen by most of mainstream society in a positive light. Ryu appeared to be included in that mindset and he'd passively avoided the male kunoichi as a result. It was a good sign then that Ryu seemed to be becoming more comfortable in his presence.

After all, it wasn't like he cross-dressed because he was "gender confused." Konatsu had no desire to actually be a woman, and he wasn't gay. He did it because he was trained that way, because as a female ninja – a kunoichi – his style of fighting and living took advantage of the female appearance. A ninja who trained to imitate a tree didn't necessarily want to be one, just as a martial artist who practiced snake style kung fu probably had no burning desire to be a serpent.

He wondered if Ryu understood that about him.

"I see you're not wearing lipstick for once," Ryu quipped with a small grin. Ranma often joked around, and everyone was pretty used to it, but Ryu's barbs, while far less numerous, were generally delivered with a bit more venom.

Konatsu tapped his lower lip with his middle finger.

"Oh!" he said with fake surprise. "I knew I forgot something!"

Ryu arched an eyebrow and stared at him for a second, before starting to laugh.

"You're a weird one, you know that?" Ryu shook his head and his laughter trailed off. "If I hadn't seen you ogling you-know-who so often..."

"We are who we were raised to be," Konatsu simply said. "And it's not 'ogling.'"

"Eyeing up, then?"

"Not that either."

Ryu smiled at the bit of back and forth banter, and Konatsu did as well. The Kumon Dojo heir was fond of teasing Konatsu about his affection for Ukyou, and after a while Konatsu had learned to find some amusement in it, too. It was a nice easy topic to joke about, and for Ryu, it was probably also a good way of reminding himself that Konatsu was a guy, too, and one who could appreciate the looks of a cute girl.

"So what are you looking at here?" Konatsu asked, standing next to the taller fighter and peering into the containment chamber. They'd taken both a Sectoid and a Snakeman prisoner, and placed them in two of the four containment cells. Both were awake, but securely strapped to the wall. The Sectoid seemed to be limp, its head down. The Snakeman stood straight, tiny eyes shining in the darkness.

"He's staring at us," Ryu replied, a little cryptically. After a second, Konatsu realized that he had to be referring to the Snakeman.

"Are you sure?" he asked. "They don't have eyelids. He could be asleep for all we know."

"No. He's staring right at us." Ryu said, utterly convinced. "And I wonder… what he sees?"

Konatsu took a deep breath, and looking into the unblinking eyes of the alien, he felt a chill run down his spine. There was something knowing about those pale heliotrope orbs, something dark and removed from human experience. It was something cold and indifferent, like light reflecting off the butcher's knife. Konatsu felt it then, too. Deep down, he knew that it was staring right at him.

"Where do you come from?" Ryu asked, from next to Konatsu, the other Squaddie's voice reassuring under the gaze of those alien eyes. "Why are you here? What did you hope to accomplish? Are we… anything… alike…?"

He smirked.

"As humans, we stand in awe of what we do not understand, and we fear death." Ryu placed his hand up against the transparent exotic alloy that separated him from the alien. "What are you afraid of, I wonder?"

"It's really amazing, isn't it?" Konatsu asked, turning from the Snakeman to the visibly less defiant Sectoid. "What we're looking at. What we're doing."

"It is."

"ETA: one minute," the pilot announced over the ship's comm. system. At the speeds the Lightning could travel at, it didn't take very long to get to and from a combat zone. The entire length of Japan could be crossed in less than a half hour.

Next to Ranma, Ryouga rested his chin on his cupped hands.

"This isn't good," he said slowly.

"I hate to say it," Ranma licked his dry lips anxiously. "But we got off easy. If that had been us…"

The leader of India Squad just nodded. The other more experienced Squads were having a tough time. The Battleship assault was going smoothly at least, but the Supply Ship that had risen presumably from the alien base in Korea had been a rude surprise. It had affected an emergency landing before it could be shot down, and when the assault teams had arrived, they'd discovered that the ship had been packed to the gills with alien troops.

A running battle had broken out, and reinforcements had needed to be redirected from other nearby bases. From reports over Command and Control, a fishing village near where the ship had landed had been essentially depopulated and half leveled in the fighting. The aliens had been wild, erratic even, and taken to uncharacteristic guerilla fighting in the countryside after the ship had been taken.

More shocking still was the unexpected speed, resilience and ferocity of the Mutons, as well as their bizarre markings. Mutons were the shock troops of the Ethereals, an army of castrated super soldiers, genetically engineered and cybernetically enhanced solely to fight and die for their masters. Already super strong and inhumanly fast, with grafted armor replacing their skin, these new Mutons were proving even more dangerous than the normal breed.

They had also exhibited unusual behavior, and soldiers had observed them going berserk at even the slightest psionic persuasion. Only the aggressive use of psionic attacks and mind control had been able to contain the situation. For the first time since Ranma and Ryouga had joined up, XCOM had taken losses. What ran over and over again through the minds of the two Lieutenants was where the aliens had come from, and where their squads were destined to assault.

Changbai.

"We'll train," Ranma said, finally. "That's all we can do."

In a few seconds, the Lightning landed effortlessly inside the Main Hangar, and the gravity lift inside the ship reactivated. Similar to the mechanism in the alien Abductor craft they had boarded, back in Nerima, it allowed one to exit through the bottom of the UFO instead of walking down the emergency ramp that retracted from the hull. It was a feature not fully operational on older Lightning craft, and one much anticipated by those attached to the ships. It also allowed the transport and operation of a HWP (Heavy Weapons Platform), a feature the original version had sorely lacked in its rush to be put into service.

Carrying their gear with them, the two Squads quickly assembled outside the landed ship to discuss what they'd taken from the combat zone. Every alien corpse, live captured alien, and every alien artifact had to be recorded and accounted for. Anything missed by the combat teams would have to be recovered by the post-combat clean up crews who sanitized the area. Failure to clean up after a mission was looked on with a great deal of disfavor by the brass. It was Ranma and Ryouga's responsibility to make sure they didn't leave a littered battlefield in their wake.

As soon as that was out of the way, Ranma pointed over to where Akane, Nodoka, Kazuo and Mitsuko were all waiting. Jogging over, the two groups met near the edge of the Hangar, near the wall and out of the way.

"Welcome back," Akane was the first to speak, and she explicitly tried to address the greeting to all of them. "It looks rough out there today."

"Huh!" Ranma scoffed, his dismissive tone underscored by his grin. "That's an understatement."

Nodoka stood back, watching her son with pride.

Shampoo growled in obvious jealousy, and grabbed Ranma by the hand. "Shouldn't we head to the debriefing, Lieutenant?"

Her forced professional tone didn't seem to annoy Akane any less than normal, and she scowled at the Chinese girl hanging onto her fiancé's arm. She was about to speak, and probably escalate the situation, when Ranma coughed and got their attention.

"Thanks for waiting, Akane. I appreciate it," he said, and then quickly addressed Shampoo. "All right, let's get going."

He slipped his hands out of Shampoo's and deftly headed for the lift.

"But…" Shampoo stamped her foot, and chased after him. Ukyou followed soon after, rolling her eyes. Kazuo took her by the shoulder, relieved that she was unhurt, and then let her go. Konatsu followed in the rear, nodding once to Akane and his friends' parents.

"Ryouga," Mitsuko said, with that other strangeness now over. "Welcome back."

He stared at her for a second before smiling honestly. "Glad to be back, mom."

"Akane," he then said, almost as an afterthought. "I hope you're ready."

Without another word, he motioned to the rest of India Squad. Ryu took up the lead, and Ryouga briefly kneeled to pet Shirokuro, who sensed that her master would be fine following one of his friends, and so stayed put. The group then followed Ranma's squad, and disappeared into the complex that was the heart of Seiran Mountain.

"We'd better go, too," Nodoka spoke up once the young men and woman of the two squads were gone.

"Right," Mitsuko agreed, and as the two women and Kazuo started towards the stairs they had entered from, they noticed that Akane was still looking out over the Hangar.

"Akane-chan?" Nodoka asked, calling to the girl.

"You guys go on," she replied, looking over her shoulder. "I'm going to hang around a little longer."

Closing her eyes, she mentally replayed what Ryouga had said before leaving.

'I hope you're ready.'

When the body bags rolled out of the next transport to land, she understood what he meant. But her commitment never wavered.

"I hope I'm ready, too."


	46. The War Path I

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. The UNETCO timetable moved ever forward, but a new complication arose as the alien forces in the Far East surged out in unexpected numbers and with surprising fury. For the first time, the Nerima crew has seen XCOM forces suffer losses, and as Operation Winter Triangle nears, they prepare themselves physically and mentally.

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia  
**Chapter XVI  
_The War Path_

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

The black suffocating blanket of the sea seemed to go on forever, the writhing and never ending waves hinting at the mysteries that lay below, unseen. It was a cold night, early in December, with a frosty wind that blew in from off the port bow of the Procyon. There was no land in sight, not the coast of Taiwan, not the coast of China - just darkness and a shivering cold. 

It was a fucking lousy assignment.

Sawat Bunyaket lit up a cigarette from the pack tucked into his coat and inhaled deeply, letting the smoke fill and warm his lungs. It was a harsh, nasty blend he'd bartered with one of the Russians for. The label was black and red, with Cyrillic characters scribbled liberally along the sides and front. Who knew what the Hell it meant?

Blowing out a sloppy cloud of the stuff, he idly ran his index finger over the safety of his AK-74, the comforting weight of the weapon falling to the strap that ran up and over his shoulder. Sawat smirked; Russian tobacco may not have been anything worth writing home about, but their weapons were just fine. Standing around guarding a solitary cargo ship was dull, sometimes sickness inducing, work… but the pay was good. In fact, it was very generous, and their employer had a surprising depth of resources.

Sawat wondered, idly, if they were part of some gun running operation?

Not that he minded or cared what his employers did: slavery, abduction, smuggling, illegal salvage… who gave a fuck? Money was money, and theirs was good. He'd sign up again, if they wanted him, after this little sea cruise was over. Taking another drag from the cig, he exhaled this time out his nose, leaving twin trails of smoke. Like a dragon, or so he secretly liked to imagine.

"Sawat!"

He looked over his shoulder, to where the voice had come from, and saw a friendly face: it was Thawon, who he'd known for almost six years now, since that bad business in Myanmar. Like Sawat, Thawon wore a generous coat to keep out the cold, and he had the hood up as well. There was little worry about waves or wetness on deck, certainly not today. The sea was a little choppy, but nothing nearly high enough to be threatening, even when at the front of the boat much less the back. He, too, had his rifle hanging from his shoulder, and the radio strapped across his chest was covered in its leather case.

"Thawon," he called, as the other man approached.

"Spare one of those?"

"Sure, but they're not great."

Sawat held out the pack, and his old comrade took one and slipped it between his lips. He then handed over his lighter, and watched as Thawon cupped the end of the coffin nail and lit it up. Handing the plastic lighter back, Thawon took a few short puffs, as was his preference, before blowing it all out at once.

"Quiet night," he said, walking over to the railing at the side of the boat. They were guarding the rear half with a few other mercenaries, all hired during the boat's stop in Thailand.

"Most are," Sawat quipped, walking over to the railing as well. He gazed casually upward, at the bright twinkling stars. After a little while, he turned to Thawon and saw that he was looking down at the water.

"You see something?" he asked, looking down for himself.

"I was looking for those dolphins…" Thawon answered. "You know from the other day? We've been in the same spot for a few days now, but they disappeared after that night."

Another fork of smoke left Sawat's nose. "That night? You think they got scared off?"

"I wouldn't blame them," Thawon said, puffing irregularly at his cigarette; a sure sign of anxiety. "That was pretty creepy. Those weird lights…"

"It was just a helicopter." Sawat nudged his friend playfully. "You and those other guys are getting worked up over nothing."

"I dunno…"

Sawat briefly thought back to that night: the Thai security had all been ordered indoors, the lights had been turned off and the window shutters closed. The Russian security had gone up on deck, to where a makeshift helicopter pad had been set up. Of course, those below decks had been curious, and a few of the more inquisitive types had come back with stories of strange lights in the sky. One guy even claimed the lights had come out of the water, but that seemed unlikely.

"I gotta take a piss," Sawat suddenly announced, and licked his finger to check the wind direction. He then started to unbuckle his belt.

"What are you doing?" Thawon groaned. "Aw, awww! Are you just going to go over the side?"

"Hell yeah," he started to undo his fly. "Why not? It's the fucking ocean!"

"There's a bathroom just fifty feet that way!" Thawon pointed behind them. "Fuck! No wonder the dolphins are avoiding us; you've been pissing in their faces! They swim in that shit!"

"You and your fucking dolphins! Fine!" Sawat zipped himself back up, and started towards the deck tower. It loomed up four stories, like a wall of steel, but there was a handy bathroom located right on the deck level. Opening the door, he flipped the seat up with his foot, and relieved himself.

Doing so, he scoffed at what his friend had said, coming up with just the reply for when he got back. The dolphins probably pissed a lot more in the ocean than he ever could, so why would they care if he did it? He thought up a few ways to phrase that argument, and then hit the flusher with his boot. Someone else would wipe it off if they used their hands, he was sure.

Opening the door, and heading back, he squinted – there was an unusual amount of fog over the deck. Looking upwards, he could see the moon, bright and looming overhead, but not the stars. Back on deck, he worked his way towards where Thawon had been. The only sounds to be heard were the rhythmic crashing of waves and the occasional creak of metal supports.

"Thawon?" he asked, finally reaching where he and his friend had just stood, smoking and watching the sea. Thawon was gone. On the grated steel floor, a still burning ember caught Sawat's eye: a half used cigarette.

"Thawon?" he repeated, calling out. "Phao? Seni?"

A dread feeling shot through his veins, and he quickly got his right hand around the handle of his AK-74. Slipping the shoulder strap off, over his head, he fumbled with his left hand to pop open the leather holster to his radio. His breath mingled with acidic nicotine smoke in the night air. Looking around frantically, he didn't see anyone, anywhere.

Then something unusual caught his eye. Up on the top of the tower, he saw someone: asleep, passed out, dead maybe, their left arm hanging over the edge below the safety rail. Suddenly very alert, he spun right, his assault rifle at the ready. Had it been a shadow, maybe something moving in the wind, or…?

Gloved hands caught him from behind, wrapping around his neck and the side of his head. He had time only to gasp in fear and surprise, and then with a twist and an audible crack, Sawat Bunyaket fell to the floor, his neck cleanly broken. In the darkness behind him, three faintly glowing red orbs moved silently through the lingering cigarette smoke.

Operation Winter Triangle was underway.

* * *

Roughly four days before Winter Triangle began. 

Ukyou raised her arm to salute, and watched as the flags were draped over the black caskets. Entombed within were the bodies of four men and women who had been lost in the recent fighting. She had been to funerals and wakes before, but this was a foreign service for those who had to stay on base, and not the real thing. The bodies, or in some cases what remained of them, would be shipped to where their families lived in XCOM operated Sanctuary Communities.

"We now commend these men and women to their countries of origin, who they so faithfully served through the defense of Earth and all her peoples." The Commander stood off to the side, but her voice was solemn and clear in the vast space of the Hangar. The bugler, Lieutenant Gottwald from Hotel Squad, began to play. Because of the unique circumstances of maintaining base secrecy there was no on-site gun salute, with that memorial honor reserved for the actual burial elsewhere.

Seeing the others standing nearby, including Ranma and Konatsu to her immediate left and right, she wished her father could have stood close by, too. Protocol, however, relegated him and other non-combat personnel to another section of the service. She saw Akane there and Nodoka too, the only woman wearing a proper black kimono. They were not expected to salute during this phase of the ceremony, but how odd would it have been to see someone like Nodoka or Genma try?

The bugle's sad tune came to a warbling end, and as one the thirty nine remaining combat officers and soldiers of Seiran Mountain clicked their heels together in salute. The simultaneous rustle of fabric and the clack of shoes on all sides sounded almost like a gunshot itself. It was an unofficial part of the memorial service that had been adopted early on in the history of UNETCO to get around the gun salute ban; Ukyou had only been told about it when she had arrived, before the ceremony started.

There was another moment of silence and then the first few were allowed to approach the caskets to pay their last respects. Afterwards, the bodies would be packed up and flown away to rejoin their families. Privately, Ukyou wondered what she would do when it was Juliet Squad's turn to go up, and if it would be inappropriate to approach one of the caskets and not the others. She looked at the casket with the South African flag draped over it (before today, she hadn't even know what that country's flag looked like at all), and tried to remember the man within. The picture of Squaddie Second Class Thomas French helped somewhat, but only in the vaguest sense.

The other two deceased were Americans, adorned in the stars and stripes. Of them, Ukyou recognized one: Squaddie Harper, from Delta Squad. The first time she had made okonomiyaki at the cafeteria (mostly for Ranma's benefit) Harper had been quite taken by the dish, and had gotten his hands terribly messy trying to eat it like New York style pizza. She smiled sadly at the memory. Seeing him laid to rest under the American flag, she also realized that somewhere in storage there was a bit of cloth emblazoned with the Rising Sun, waiting for her turn… if it came to that.

She'd read the reports on the mission, and how Delta Squad had been gutted by a Blaster Bomb. That particular weapon was probably the most feared out of the entire alien arsenal. The Visitors didn't use missiles or mortars or normal artillery support, instead they used guided bombs – basically tiny UFOs – that could weave around tight corners, climb up a flight of steps, strike nearly anywhere, and explode with enough force to level an office building. One of these had been used to utterly destroy the sturdy old two story building she had leased to run her restaurant out of.

Even in his Personal Armor, Squaddie Second Class Harper had been torn in half by the explosion that went off just behind him. The entire squad could have been wiped out, if not for the fact that they were operating in a spread out formation. It was a sobering reminder. Sooner or later, Juliet Squad would end up facing those terrible weapons, too.

When the time came, she did approach the caskets, having decided to pay what respects she could to each of them. The first one was the hardest to face by far. Beneath a simple looking blue and gold flag rested the body of Lieutenant Lofquist, who had been in command of Delta and Charlie Squads for only six months. She had been Ukyou's mentor for two of those months, and to the younger woman, she had been a model to emulate in the new world she had been thrown into.

Early on, the Lieutenant had drilled into her the importance of retraining her mind and body – to think and work like part of a team, and not as an individual fighter. She had told Ukyou to put aside whatever personal feelings, good or bad, that she had originally possessed towards her team mates. At first, Ukyou had resisted that recommendation, afraid to lose whatever gains she had made with Ranma… now she saw the wisdom of it. She understood why, and she felt gladdened to have had that advice given to her so early on. More than anything, Lieutenant Lofquist had taught her the value of professionalism.

Placing her hand on the flag, Ukyou wished she had something more spiritual, more significant, to say or even think. Despite being a martial arts family, and thus exposed to what many would call the supernatural on a far more frequent basis than those from a normal upbringing, she had never really felt particularly in touch with religion in general. Her father certainly wasn't the religious sort, she couldn't really remember her mother, and to her religion in all its forms had always seemed a little too… outlandish and superstitious. If a tea cup cracked or a leaf landed the wrong way or if she sneezed, she simply wasn't keen on seeing anything more to the event than there was.

Here, her pragmatism left her short on words.

Taking a deep breath, she whispered just what came to mind.

"Thank you."

It was pretty paltry as far as last words to someone went, but they neatly summed up her feelings, and that was what was important. To the others, she simply said "good bye" and "rest in peace." The aliens had killed them, but at least they had died fighting, and knowing the risks. It was a warrior's death, and as good as any could ask for. One day the world would know about them, remember them, and honor them, as heroes.

"Until then…" She patted the last flag, let her hand linger there for an extra second, and then walked by. Soon, there would be new recruits, and Ukyou vowed to get to know them better. She wanted to know who she was saying good bye to, next time, and… then there was also a more selfish thought. There was the hope that, if the worst happened to her, there would be others who would place their hand on her flag, and vow to fight on.

Lingering nearby for Konatsu to finish, she felt a hand on her shoulder. To her surprise and relief, it was Ranma, and the expression on his face was one she couldn't remember seeing before. He looked concerned, troubled by something outside of his control, and his usual cockiness – even under dire circumstances – was tempered by a certain sobriety. More surprising still, his touch didn't excite her like it once would have. There was comfort in it, and silent reassurance, but no spark.

Maybe it was the moment, the mood, setting in.

And besides, they were still on duty.

Ranma wasn't good with words, and so he just squeezed her shoulder, and she nodded wordlessly. Without him saying it, she knew he would be there to listen to her, to help her, if she had any concerns that needed voicing. When she didn't try and see him as her fiancé, he was easy to accept again as a friend… and as a leader.

Konatsu and Shampoo stood nearby, the latter less than amused, but not interrupting. Ranma released her shoulder, and looked them over: his Juliet Squad. There was something between them all now, different than what they had had in Nerima. It wasn't harmony, it was something else. Something new.

"Let's go," Ranma said, and they did.

All her life, Ukyou had chased after him… to beat him, to stop him, to marry him, to defeat him, to be with him. It had seemed like there was nothing else more important in life than that. But she had been wrong. Her duel with Konatsu, and the memories it had brought up, had forced her to face that truth.

She and Ranma would have to have that talk after all.

* * *

**From:** Cptn. Joshua Ben-Solomon  
** Sent**: Tuesday, December 1, 2006, 09:18  
** To**: SLt. Hibiki Ryouga  
** Subject:** - Request for Form 021A 

Special Lieutenant,

I'd like you to fill out a Form 021A. You know where to download it.

You probably know who this is about. You'll have to print it out first, obviously, and fill it out with black pen only. I'll need a copy on my desk, and you can send the originals to Commander Yasuda. You also have the option of declining the recommendation, and if you are, just email me back. If you're going to go ahead and fill this form out, I'd also like to have a brief talk about the situation to make sure about things, since I'm handling this case. It shouldn't take more than a minute or two.

Also: I understand Andrew came around after all. He's a hardass alright, and kind of paranoid, but not totally unsympathetic. I'm glad I was able to help. Just watch what you say when you're down there in ACI. Even when you're alone, the walls hear everything.

Captain Ben-Solomon  
Far East Asia Branch  
United Nations Extraterrestrial Combat Organization  
Ext. 1086 - phone  
Ext. 7512 - fax

* * *

**From:** Drctr. Weissman  
**Sent: ** Monday, November 30, 2006, 18:09  
**To:** SLt. Hibiki Ryouga  
**Subject: **Re: Your Request  
**Attached:** Form01048D113006Hibiki.pdf

Your persistent interest in this matter has been noted.

While it is not my preference, I will humor your request just this once, as the circumstances are rather unique. You will have a twenty minute window of opportunity, between exactly 11:50 and 12:10 hours, on December 1 as requested. You will have five minutes, and you will be monitored.

Attached is a copy of your request form and our response for your own records.

--

Director Andrew Weissman  
Special Research and Intelligence Division  
UNETCO Far East Command  
Ext. 2708 - phone  
Ext. 2709 – fax

-----


	47. The War Path II

* * *

Akane stepped carefully over a fallen log, dividing her attention between navigating the terrain, keeping her rifle at the ready, and watching the sonar like display of her weapon's motion sensor. Softly biting her lower lip, she pressed up against a large tree nearby, and tried to blink a stray strand of hair out of her right eye. She could see now why Ryu wore a headscarf, like Genma's, when going out on a mission. 

Stalking carefully towards her target, she began to see the outline of a structure behind the dappled forest background of branch and bush. It was quiet, the only sounds coming from her on-loan suit of personal armor: the faint hum of electronics, the occasional pin or beep from her sensors, all inaudible outside the suit itself. Carefully, she advanced on the position, using the trees to break up her outline. She had to keep her movements fluid, and not too rapid, or else risk sticking out against the background. She was wearing the full kit forest camo package, while her opponent was not, and this was possibly the only advantage she had over him.

Her ears and eyes strained to see the threat that she knew lurked somewhere nearby. It was unfortunate that ears and eyes were of limited usefulness. Sound, by nature, was so slow that you'd be killed before it reached your ears. Good eyes were a godsend, but only useful in a fairly tight cone directly ahead. Like most high caliber martial artists, she had a danger sense of sorts, but it was nowhere near as well developed as someone like Ranma's. It was just a gut feeling of unease, undirected and imprecise.

Moving parallel to the building immediately ahead, she swept her aim over the roof, and across every window. There was still nothing on her motion sensor. Since she knew her opponent was out there, that just meant he was setting an ambush. It wasn't comforting. This time, she wouldn't…

"Warning!" the armor all but screamed, and a red arrow pointed in the calculated direction of the attack. "Laser!"

Akane swept her aim rapidly towards the treat, but it was too late. Her personal armor blared a siren in her ears, and a display popped up on the helmet HUD indicating a strike to her torso, around the stomach area. She'd been hit. Sighing, she lowered her weapon and saw her opponent hiding amid the high branches of a tree. She'd entered his line of fire coming around the side of the building.

Ryu jumped down, and slung his laser rifle over his shoulder.

"I can't believe you got me again!" Akane unfastened the airtight locks that kept her helmet in place, and lifted it off. At least now she could tuck that strand of hair out of the way.

"Don't rely so heavily on the motion sensor when you're operating solo," Ryu spoke up when he got a little closer. "It's most effective when there are multiple sensors overlapping the same area, and don't forget that it only has an effective operating radius of fifty meters. Out in the open like this, you'll usually get sniped at from outside that range."

"I would've used thermals, but its so disorienting!" Akane looked down at the helmet. She still had a lot of practice to go before she could use it to its full capabilities. "I don't know how you're supposed to aim like that while moving around…"

Ryu shook his head, and then slowly took his own helmet off.

"Some guys shutter activate thermals, but you can layer views too, you know. That's what I do, since the resolution from infrared isn't nearly as good as your eyes are used to, and it only covers a small bracketed area." He held out his helmet for her, the wires still attached to the body of his suit. "Here. See for yourself."

Akane took a few steps closer, since the wires keeping the helmet connected to him weren't very long, and slipped it on. She immediately saw what he meant. Layered over the normal view of the world through the HUD, there was a faint bracket or square. Within that square she could see heat signatures coming from her hands, and from Ryu standing nearby. It was somewhat strange, like the world dyed in red and yellows, but not nearly as intense as a pure infrared image: the purple tint was missing. Where an IR camera would normally leave vast tracks of blue or violet, it was essentially normal.

"You must've used some sort of electronic filter…" Akane guessed.

"The armor supports a pretty wide range of modification," Ryu explained, as Akane looked around more. "I have the infrared layer set to highlight mode, where it only displays the upper range of heat signatures on top of my normal view. Quartermaster Arugula did the actual programming work."

"I like this a lot more!" Akane turned her head, and it caught short, the wire between the helmet and Ryu's body armor coming taunt. Taking this as a sign, she took the helmet off and handed it back to him.

"You want to take a break?" he asked, tucking the helmet under his right arm.

She was about to decline, and ask for another crack at attacking the building he had been playing alien guard for, when he cut her off.

"I'm hungry, so let's stop and have lunch." He walked past her without another word, heading for where they'd left their packs.

"Why'd you even bother asking me, if your mind was already made up?" Akane fell in step and trailed behind him.

"Courtesy," he replied offhand. "There was a chance you'd have said 'ok,' and then I could agree and say I was going easy on you."

Akane just shook her head and followed him as he walked around and into the concrete training building. It was built to resemble a house, at least in terms of floor plan if not ornamentation. Inside, the walls were stark and rough, the doors swung open on heavy hinges, and the furniture and other faux-design touches were 2D wooden cutouts. Still, as unlike home as it was, it still made her wonder how things were in Nerima. With everyone gone, it was probably quiet… maybe even normal.

They had caused that neighborhood a lot of grief over the years, hadn't they?

Ryu led her up a flight of stairs, where they retrieved their backpacks from the "master bedroom" of the house, and then up onto the roof. Putting down his rifle, turning off and detaching his helmet, and otherwise removing the many appurtenances of war he had adopted as a soldier in XCOM, Ryu seemed to become a bit more human in her eyes. He became more like she remembered him, from back when he had first arrived in Nerima posing as Ranma.

Then again, a lot of his bitterness and desperation was gone now, and he seemed much more relaxed than he ever had back then when he had been trying to get hold of the _Umisenken_. Such a change could only be seen as a good thing, in Akane's opinion. Ryu had given up on that school of techniques now, and seemed to be happily pursuing and remaking the _Yamasenken_ into a new "reformed" style that could become the foundation of a new Kumon Family Dojo. Akane briefly wondered if he and Nodoka ever talked anymore, since they hadn't parted on bad terms before, all things considered.

"Hey, Akane, if you want to, we can do some Yamasenken practice while we're out here." He sat his lunch down in front of him: a chicken Caesar wrap from the base cafeteria, and a thermos of soup, still hot. "Maybe work on the Moko Kaimon Ha or Dokuja Tanketsu Sho?"

She could guess what his idea of training out here meant. "You want me to practice jabbing my hand into a tree, don't you?"

"That's how I learned it!" He smiled brightly. "After you lose the first few fingernails…"

Akane held out her hand, gesturing wildly for him not to continue. That wasn't an image she wanted to have in her mind before eating. She could break a concrete block with the fleshy bottom half of her hand, or with her fist, but jabbing her fingers spear-like into a tree or rock…

"A little harsh, huh?" Ryu looked up, and started to think. "I suppose I should look into a safer way of teaching that one. Maybe practicing it on a side of beef or something…"

"Ryu, please? Eating?" She pointed down at her own lunch when he looked in her direction. He laughed a bit, and nodded, leaving any further torturous or bloody minded training methods to run around in his head instead of being spoken out loud and ruining her appetite.

"Besides," Akane added, her own Dojo upbringing coming to the fore. "Why not just work a student up from something a little easier? Or use a makiwara?"

"That's not a bad idea," Ryu agreed, and unscrewed the thermos he'd brought. Immediately, a trail of steam rose up from within, and Akane could just barely smell what was inside.

"Bisque?" she guessed.

"Clam Chowder, actually. New England style, good stuff," Ryu inclined his head to her boxed lunch while putting the thermos down to cool a bit. "What'd you bring?"

Akane beamed at him. "I made my own food!"

Ryu instantly recoiled, warding himself with crossed arms. "And you left base without a hazmat suit?!"

"Ha. Ha. Very Funny," Akane groused, angrily shaking her fist. A second later she was calm again, or at least only mildly put out. "Don't listen to that idiot, Ranma. I've gotten a lot better." Her eyes glinted as she assumed an (over) confident pose. "I've been training like my life depended on it!"

By his half-lidded eyes and dubious expression, he wasn't convinced. "If you're going to eat that, I'd say your life does depend on…"

A second later he fell to the ground, the butt of a rifle planted into his forehead.

"I happen to be very sensitive about my cooking, thank you very much," she clarified, as if that much wasn't obvious already.

"Now I see…" Ryu straightened up, gently massaging his forehead. "Now I see how Ranma got so tough and how he could shake off all those hits I gave him. Two years of being pounded on by you would turn anyone into a tank."

"Think whatever you want," Akane huffed, and opened her plastic wrapped _bento_ box. Picking up a bit of _onigiri_, she smirked at him before putting it into her mouth. "I'm going to enjoy my…"

For a second, she just sat there, her eyes growing wider and wider.

"Your?" he asked, a bead of sweat running down his brow.

Akane's eyes started to water.

"Mmm! Spicy!" She managed to say, 'casually' reaching for a bottle of water.

"Just like you planned, eh?" he asked, holding back laughter. "Let me guess: red hot flavored rice balls? Fiery Kimche flavor?"

Akane quickly gulped down a few mouthfuls of water, and composed herself.

"If you really want to know," she answered, totally serious. "Tendo style buffalo wing flavor."

For a second, Ryu almost believed her.

"No way."

"It's the absolute truth."

"I'm sorry: no. No way. No. Way."

Akane gestured down to the rice balls. "Go on, then. Have one. My treat. You know you want to."

Ryu crossed his arms, actually considering it. She could see that he was curious, even though he had to know what "Akane Tendo style" anything tasted like. Just a little more pushing and she'd have him.

"Then again," she started to reach down, as if to pick up another of them. "If you can't take the heat, I understand…"

"As if I'd fall for reverse psychology!" Ryu chuckled arrogantly at the very thought, but then picked out one of the unassuming little _onigiri_ for himself. "However, **as a man**, I can not pass up this challenge. Itadakimasu!"

And just like that, he foolishly ate her cooking, and of his own accord no less. No sooner was he into his third chew than he stopped completely, and a chill ran down his body, freezing him in place. His eyes grew wide as saucers, and he wordlessly gasped a few times before regaining motor control.

Gritting his teeth, he clutched his chest, gulping down savage desperate breaths.

"I'm… still alive?" he whispered. "That was… that was…" With a gasp, he reached for his own bottle of water, yelling. " Buffalo Style my ass! More like wasabi and vinegar style!!"

Akane laughed as he struggled to drown the taste out of his mouth, and took the opportunity to pour some of his cafeteria-made clam chowder into a bowl she'd emptied the rice out of. It was only fair that he give her some of his food, after _enjoying_ some of hers.

The sausages, rice, and seaweed salad she'd also packed along hadn't come out nearly as bad as the _onigiri _(she really would have to check with Kasumi to see where she went wrong this time), and the New England style clam chowder that Ryu had brought was both steaming hot and delicious. They joked a bit more while they ate, and while Akane certainly didn't like having her bad cooking pointed out, Ryu wasn't Ranma. The reason Ranma's jibes had hurt so much was because she cared, she cared a lot, about what he thought of her as a woman.

"Stupid Ranma," she muttered, remembering their last 'talk.' Ryu seemed to sense her change in temperament and mood, and guessed accurately as to its source. It was also just as possible that he had simply overheard her.

"So, I guess you're going along with it then," Ryu said, finishing off his drink.

"I applied two days ago." She closed her eyes and sighed. "I don't even know if they'll let me in. I mean… I don't have the kind of experience… I never spent years in the military, or law enforcement, or anything. What do I really have that all those other men and women from around the world don't?"

Ryu didn't reply right away, instead he reached for his rifle and placed on in his lap.

"Akane," he said then, face stern. "Do you really want to do this? 'Cause let me tell you… it's scary out there. At any moment you could be killed. You may not even see it coming. That's what happened to Delta Squad, you know. One moment they were advancing, not even under enemy fire, and the next…"

He snapped his fingers.

"Just like that, Akane. Just like that. If that had been my squad there, tough as we all are, at least one of us would have died right then and there. Do you really want to be involved in that sort of life? Do you really want to take the lives of others?"

"They aren't human," Akane interrupted him, her hate filled tone directed at distant and seemingly untouchable enemy. "They're monsters. Why should I have a problem killing monsters?!"

"That's a good question: why should you?" He asked, rhetorically of course. Akane just looked at him questioningly.

"They're aliens to us, we're aliens to them," Ryu continued, and in a way he seemed grateful to get the idea off his chest. "I don't have a problem fighting them, or killing them… my record proves that. But I don't think they're monsters. And if you think of them that way, then you're putting your own life in danger. They're evil, I'll give you that, but they move… they move like men…"

He let out a deep breath, and rubbed the back of his neck.

"I'm just asking," he clarified, "if you're doing this because it's the right thing to do or because you… I don't know, because you want to fit in?"

Akane leaned back, away from him, and rested on her hands. The roof was flat and rough, all concrete. It wasn't like the roof of Furinkan High School, where she and her friends, and even Ranma sometimes, ate together to enjoy the good weather. It was chilly out, though she didn't feel it through the personal armor she wore, and not exactly ideal for a lunch outdoors with a friend. As if to undercut that thought, she could see a few solitary flakes of snow drifting down from above.

"Its true…" she admitted, both to him and to herself. "I don't want to be the only one of us just staying at the base. I guess I do feel a little guilty being the only one not risking my life. I do think, sometimes, that if I could only be out there helping… that maybe there isn't something wrong with me – something deficient – that the others have and I don't."

Ryu listened silently.

"So, I guess I do have those kinds of reasons for doing this. But," Akane said, and she flexed a fist, raising it to the sky. "I also want to prove that, when it really counts, I can put everything I've learned to good use. I mean, a martial artist's duty is to protect those who can not protect themselves, right? And, I think, to try and always do good. I want to do good… so how the Hell can I call myself a martial artist if I don't try and fight?"

Ryu Kumon crossed his arms at that, and shook his head.

"You've still got that nosy, I-can't-leave-well-enough-alone, attitude of yours," he noted with some amusement. "But, thinking like that, as least you won't regret it."

She smiled at that.

"Ok, ok, let's pack up and get some more practice in." Standing up he put the crumpled wrapper from his food away and into a pocket of his pack, he then did likewise for his thermos. Akane also quickly finished cleaning up what was left of her lunch, and put the bento box back in her own bag.

"Who'd you ask for a recommendation, by the way?" he asked, zipping his pack up. "I doubt Ranma or Ryouga…"

She shouldered her bag and answered simply, "Sergeant Harrison."

" Harrison? 'Hellfire' Harrison? From Echo Squad?" Akane nodded at Ryu's incredulous question.

Ryu was obviously impressed. Echo and Foxtrot Squads were two of the oldest and most experienced on the base, specializing in UFO assault and anti-terror missions. Echo itself had been the same four people together for the last year and a half, managing the coveted hundred-kills-no-casualties ratio.

"How did you manage that?"

She shrugged. "He helped me with my marksmanship a while back and thought I had some potential. I'd never have gotten this far this fast without him."

"Well, that's as good a recommendation as any," Ryu conceded. "But you've still got a lot of work to do before you're ready for combat. Now… let's go plant our fists in some trees!"

With a chuckle, he jumped off the roof; Akane wasn't far behind.

* * *

Doctor Mark Pearson was a balding Caucasian man in his fifties, and the head of Seiran Mountain's all important trauma center specializing in the treatment of burns. He was unbowed with age, and in fact stood at an even six feet tall just as he had twenty years ago. The doctor was a staunch proponent of regular fitness, and exercised vigorously – the Dojo being practically next door to the base gym, Kasumi had seen him there several times.

At the moment, he was in his office, nestled among clusters of papers arranged in a thoroughly disorganized fashion. He seemed to pride himself on being able to quickly find things using his own unique brand of organization, despite what Kasumi couldn't help but see as an entirely dreadful mess. Near his computer, she could see several small framed pictures of his family, and a roughly sculpted pencil and pen holder that looked to have been made by a toddler. On one wall there was an oil painting of a bucolic homestead set among rolling hills and scattered high trees.

Everywhere else, the room was less insouciant and more professional in appearance. Degrees of certification and other academic awards stood on proud display, along with a few pictures of the doctor meeting important looking people. There was another small metal and glass case attached to the wall, containing a little metallic badge: the Rod of Asclepius within a laurel wreath and a crown on top, all in bronze but with some silver on the bottom beneath the rod. Three large posters, two on the walls and one on the door, were technical in origin. One showed a long cascade of proteins, amino acids and metabolites involved in some aspect of inflammation and healing, for the second Kasumi's flash-imprinted memory identified as the _de novo_ cycle, and the last poster was a vast array or matrix of genetic markers all in tiny writing.

"Doctor?" she inquired, seeing that he was just sorting through papers on his desk. To make sure she had his attention, she gently tapped on the door for added measure.

"Hmm? Oh, Kasumi!" He looked up at her briefly, then down at the papers, and then back at her. "What can I help you with?"

"I just need to step out for a little while," she felt the need to explain, "I've been asked to help someone down in ACI. I should be back in less than a half hour."

"That's fine, fine," he said, and went back to flipping through the pages of one of the documents, looking for something. "Just be sure to check in on those epidermal grafts before fourteen hundred hours. And I'll want reports on the progress of all bioshop stocks by fifteen hundred."

"I will, Doctor," she replied, and bowed her head out of deeply engrained habit. "Thank you."

She didn't mind that he didn't bow back, instead just nodding his head as a sign that she was free to go. After all, he wasn't Japanese, was he? How different he was, not just compared to the family Doctors Kasumi had had over the years, but also compared to Doctor Tofu, her old friend. Tofu had always been such a playful, joking character, his wisdom and compassion a reserve that always came to the fore when he was most needed. Doctor Pearson was rather dour, and seemingly more rooted in biological experimentation and management of the faculty under his guidance than the traditional image Kasumi had of a physician. Perhaps it was age? Pearson was fifty-something, while Tofu had only turned thirty last year.

Then there was the biggest difference: Doctor Pearson had little regard for holistic, alternative or 'traditional' medicine, including the acupuncture and pressure points Doctor Tofu made use of. He had been interested to hear Kasumi and the others' anecdotal accounts of _moxibustion_ and other pressure point techniques, but had placed the effectiveness not on the reproducibility of the techniques themselves, but on the fact that the practitioners had exhibited obvious psionic capabilities beforehand. The effect, he said, was due to the one using the technique and not the technique itself.

At first, Kasumi hadn't much liked that notion.

Not just because it felt like a disparagement against Dr. Tofu himself, who she still thought very well of, but also because… that sort of medicine was so rooted in the identity she had of herself, as a good Japanese person. She had aspired to enter that field of medicine, after all, if and when her duties to the Tendo household permitted. It seemed like a good traditional way to help the community. Now, after all the information UNETCO had flashed into her mind regarding patient care, medicine and pharmacology, she was beginning to have doubts. She was beginning to wonder if Dr. Pearson hadn't been right. It was a little… troubling, sometimes, to think about it.

She was grateful, though, for all she had learned and she had been happy when the Doctor had let her help oversee the bioshop cloning procedures. Commander Yasuda wanted to double the standing stock of replacement dermis and internal tissues by next Thursday, and it was good opportunity for someone in training like herself; someone with the memories and the knowledge, but not the practical hands-on experience. Eventually, she hoped that she could earn an Associate Degree in Emergency Medical Science from UNETCO's medical corps.

It was still what she wanted, even if it wasn't exactly what she had planned. She thought of her mother, Kimiko, and knew how proud she would have been to see her eldest daughter enter a respectable field of study. It would be a lot of work, and could even mean that she had to pass on the duty of taking care of the Tendo home to Akane (who was to inherit the Dojo and the property anyway), but if it would mean saving lives… her mother would understand. She would approve.

"Hey, Kasumi!" someone called her name as she headed past her work station and towards the door. "Hold up a sec!"

Stopping, she saw one of Dr. Pearson's assistants, another doctor named Matthew Roane. He was the man directly under Pearson in charge of the Bioshop Fabrication Laboratory, but he wasn't a medical doctor at all. Instead, he moved between the medical facility and Xenobiological Research downstairs. Unlike Doctor Pearson, he did remind her of Doctor Tofu… they were even about the same age.

"Yes, Doctor Roane?" She asked, letting him maneuver across the room towards her. He carried a plain brown clipboard almost all the time, keeping it stocked with notes and printouts. He was Caucasian, like most of the people here in Seiran, and probably American, with brown hair and a bit of rough stubble like he only ever half shaved.

"Yeah, uh," he began, pausing to put together what he wanted to say. "Since you're checking our epidermal Type-16s later, I wanted to remind you that the B and C baths won't match up with the time plots in Lab Three Twenty. I'm running a new germinal layer procedure on those, so we can seed them with the improved engineered monocyte and lymphocyte populations. So, uh, if you can… just… forward the information on those two baths to me, too, ok? That'd be just great."

Kasumi smiled and nodded agreeably. "It isn't a problem, I'll be sure to do just that."

"All right, thanks," he replied, and stood there for a few more seconds. "I, uh, guess I'll see you later."

Ha gave her a little wave, and headed back the way he had come. On his hand, Kasumi saw one of the things that also differentiated Doctor Roane from Tofu: he was married. Most of the base personnel were, and she could only imagine how hard it was for their spouses to be separated from them for so long, worried about their safety.

"Oh," she suddenly realized, checking the clock on the wall nearby. "I'm running a little late…"

Leaving the medical ward, it only took a minute to catch an elevator heading down. She was heading to an area of the base she had never been to before, but it wasn't far from where she worked. It was technically a branch of the Research Directorate, but functioned on a nearly independent basis after some sort of scandal that happened in one of the European bases. Now the Special Research and Intelligence Division had a particularly paranoid chain of command answerable to the base commanding officer, and not the Research Director.

The elevator doors opened and bathed Kasumi in the soft green light from a nearby sign, indicating what was down which hallway. Overhead, a circular outline in the ceiling was an indication of one of the base's internal defense mechanisms: a security turret with an easy line of fire down any of the three corridors. There was a map of the floor on the wall nearby, and she glanced at it momentarily… just long enough to refresh the memory of the place burned into her mind.

Up ahead was general storage, leading to a main room, L shaped, with a lift and four access points to the different storage areas. Radiological, bio hazard, and chemical hazard type 2 or above substances were all security access only. To her left were the offices and labs, including the lockers and a small workshop, and the restrooms. Past the security station there was an airlock, which lead to another hallway that provided access to the xenobiology, xenosociology, xenopsychology and xenopsionics laboratories. To her left there was the main security office and two consecutive airlocks separated by an automated security station: that led to ACI, and two secure transport halls leading from containment to the labs.

ACI: Alien Containment and Isolation.

She saw Ryouga off to her right with Shirokuro, reading something on the wall near a large transparent pane of alien alloy. She called out to him as she walked over, and he offered a hesitant smile at her approach. Soon, she could see what he had been reading. It was a copy of the ACI Security Protocols, and what to do in case of an emergency. Kasumi dearly hoped there wouldn't be one, but she wasn't entirely sure what he planned to do here.

"Kasumi," he said, glad to see her. "Thanks for coming."

"It was no trouble at all, Ryouga-kun," she replied, exchanging quick pleasantries. She was glad he hadn't tacked on the 'san' honorific; the last time they had talked she had insisted that it wasn't necessary. "Though I'll confess to being a little unsure why you asked for me to come, and not one of your other friends."

"Kasumi," he sounded a bit strained. "I needed someone I could… trust. Not that I don't trust anyone else, I trust my men, but I need discretion and honesty from someone outside my own Squad. I'd rather no one else even know I'm down here."

She tilted her head at that comment. "Why?"

"You'll see…" He turned to Shirokuro. "Stay here, girl. I'll be back soon. Stay."

The black and white dog understood this perfectly, and trotted over to the wall to lay down with her back against it. Ryouga then led Kasumi over to a large set of doors: they were matte grey-white, with small transparent windows from which one could see inside. They were of the sliding security-type, and locked together like a magnetic vice. Ryouga slid his security keycard over a reader set into the wall, and then looked into a visor shaped retinal scanner.

"Security clearance confirmed!" A computer voice cheerily announced. The doors opened with a click, and the two stepped into the first security airlock. Immediately ahead, opposite the opened doors, was another clear pane of alien alloy. Two security guards were behind it, in another room alight with screens and monitoring stations.

"Lieutenant," one of the guards said over a concealed intercom. "We've been expecting you. Please present ID and stand by for security scan. You, too, ma'am."

Kasumi retrieved her card from one of her white uniform pockets. UNETCO security was very tight, even for people inside the base. She knew about the tracking microchips implanted on everyone on the base, which were used to keep a record of their moment from place to place. They were also used to run security checks on ID cards, so that no one could use a card that wasn't mated to the chip implanted in them.

The highest security areas checked not only the chip and the card, but also required a retina scan and a human guard present. In all its years of operation, dealing with all manner of inhuman and human enemies, XCOM maximum security had never been breached or fooled.

"ID check confirmed. Timelog entered. Security clearance confirmed," the guard read off the information from the display in front of him, and nodded as he said at last, "Scan is clean, you're good to go."

Another of the sliding doors, a pair placed to their right, opened. Inside was another room, square except for the northeast corner which was cut short. There was a ceiling turret on the north and east sides of the room, paired with a similar floor turret which didn't retract. One side of the turret she could see was a closed cylinder, almost certainly containing a missile or rocket of some sort. The other half of the turret was a large and mean looking machine gun. In the northeast corner, behind transparent metal, two Heavy Weapons Platforms sat in hibernation mode, waiting for the call to arms.

There was one final airlock to go through.

The doors to this one were unlike those previous. For these, there was just the smooth and seamless surface of the wall, though a black and yellow 'warning' outline had been painted to indicate where the point of egress was meant to be. A red light clicked on, filling the room with a crimson hue, and then the metal within the marked boundary started to flow, like a liquid. Kasumi remembered this sort of thing from her experience on the alien ship, where the doors had operated in a similar fashion. In fact even complex control surfaces in the table, in addition to simpler chairs, had risen out of the floor like mushrooms out of the soil. It was a strange and amazing technology to behold.

"Kasumi?" Ryouga prompted, and held out his hand for her to follow him. A little shaken, she took his hand and they entered the second airlock. Inside, warning labels adorned the walls to the left, and to her right she could see through the transparent pane down the hall where they had come. She could even see the elevator doors. Behind them, the wall resealed itself, and a second later the wall before them melted away.

A white on green sign on the ceiling indicated they were finally in the alien containment wing. It was a long hall, and despite being well lit and as clean as an operating room, it gave her the chills. There was a small door to the right with a sign over it that read, 'Secure Transport: Xenosciences,' and a much larger door to her left that read, 'Cellblock A: humanoid.'

"We want Cellblock C," Ryouga said, and though he briefly looked down at his hand, which she was still holding, he returned his focus on the far end of the hall. A small flash of moment caught Kasumi's eye, and she spotted one of the (probably many) well hidden cameras throughout this area. Special Research and Intelligence Division would be monitoring everything; listening in on everything.

There was no way to get lost down a single hallway, even for a Hibiki. The two walked past a slight indentation in the walls, bordered by striped yellow and black, and a label that read, 'Warning: Laser Wall' and then another with the words: 'Notice: Minefield – Do Not Enter If Security Light Is Active.' A billet in the wall contained several bright orange emergency hazmat suits.

Finally, near the end of the hall, there was a large door demarcation to the left, and a sign that read, 'Cellblock B: Non-humanoid.' In front of them was another door, this one with red highlights. The sign above it read simply, 'Incinerator.' Lastly, to their right was the final cellblock: 'Cellblock C: Psionic.' One last retina scan, and this door, too, opened.

Inside was a "clean room" with two doors. A computer system monitored the prisoners, their vital life signs, and other information. Kasumi felt a slight buzz in the back of her head, and found the source of it broadcast for all to see: 'Psionic Dampeners Active' followed by four green lights and two red ones. On a wall nearby was another copy of the evacuation and security procedure protocols.

Stage 1 – Immediate Evacuation and Quarantine  
Stage 2 – Activation of IFF Automated Defenses  
Stage 3 – Activation of Laser Walls  
Stage 4 – Activation of Minefield  
Stage 5 – Introduction of Incineration Aerosol  
Stage 6 – Atmosphere Ignition and Evacuation

The idea of "Atmosphere Ignition and Evacuation" didn't exactly make her feel much safer. This was a lot of security for just six prisoners; XCOM obviously wasn't taking any chances. In fact, that was why she was here. Updated security protocols when dealing with psi-capable aliens detailed that any meeting or interrogation required not only security personnel oversight, and electronic monitoring and eavesdropping, but also the presence of a 'second actor' to ensure no 'cross contamination.' That way, experiences and memories of the event could be compared between the two to make sure they were synchronous, both in a written report and (if necessary) through a mind probe.

Ryouga opened one of the doors, leading to a narrow hallway that ran parallel to the prisoners' cells. There was another hall on the other side as well, allowing a maximum of two independent interrogations to take place in any given cellblock. Beyond was another door marked with the label 'Secure Transport: Xenopsionics.' Kasumi didn't know it, but the two of them wouldn't be going that far. They were almost there.

A Sectoid sat in the first cell – a cube of alien metal, with two wide transparent strips running from the floor to the ceiling. Inside she could see a small cot to sleep in, the plastic chair it was sitting on, a small table and a strange round globe sticking out of the floor. On the table were pieces of paper peppered with alien writing. It seemed to watch them with its bulbous eyes as they walked past. There was no discernable expression on its face, but Kasumi could all but feel its malice towards them.

She squeezed Ryouga's hand; she didn't want to be here.

The next cell held a creature she had never seen in person before. It floated in the air and resembled nothing so much as a worm eaten corpse. Its skin was a pale and sickly white with occasional splotches of gray. The arms were long and dangled limply, atrophied muscles apparently unable to lift the now dead weights. There was less a face and more a skull with the flesh peeled back and away. What could have once been eyes were just dead prunes set inside frightful sockets. The creature ignored them, and she turned away from it.

The next cell held a creature with titian robes, its back to them. Inside the room, the strange sphere was glowing and it seemed to have the alien's full attention. Finally, at the forth cell, she saw something that was a relief after what had come before: a human being. He wore ciel blue medical scrubs, had a slightly unkempt head of black hair and a scruffy beard. His eyes were vivid green, and they brightened at seeing his visitors.

The lost boy flipped a switch turning on the comm. system.

"Ah, Ryouga," the man said, focusing first and foremost on the younger man. "Nice to see you again; I was hoping you'd drop by."

The lost boy stared at the man for a second before responding.

"You've looked better… dad."


	48. The War Path III

Tetsuya stood and craned his neck back and forth, working the kinks out of bone, muscle and sinew. He was a tall man, taller than his son, and similarly built. He also seemed entirely out of place in the Alien Containment and Isolation ward, surrounded by such heavy security and such alien counterparts in the adjacent cells. At the word 'dad,' Kasumi stared at him with utmost curiosity.

'Why hadn't I heard about this before?' was the first thing she thought, followed immediately by, 'What on Earth was he doing here?'

"I've looked better, huh?" Tetsuya asked; apparently quite amused by the comment. "That's a cute response. But I actually feel much better than I look. How's your mother? You taking care of her?"

"I'd say she doesn't need me to, but I am." Ryouga took a step towards the cell, and placed his palm on the seamless and nearly indestructible alloy that it was constructed out of.

The father's eyes focused on Kasumi. "And this little lady here?"

"A friend of mine, Tendo Kasumi," Ryouga replied, using the Japanese surname first, and then elaborated on her purpose in being present, "She's here for security purposes. Kasumi, this is my father. Hibiki Tetsuya."

"Pleased to meet you, Hibiki-san," Kasumi said, and bowed politely.

He bowed back, much to her secret approval.

"A pleasure," he said with a friendly smile. "I'm glad you came… someone has to make sure my son here doesn't get lost around here."

Ryouga shook his head at that in amusement. "I'm sure they'd love to have me stumble into xenotoxicology or something yelling about where the hell containment was. I have Shirokuro, though. She knows her way around."

"You took the dog with you, too?" Tetsuya's tone took on a fatherly note of exasperation. "What have I told you about that?"

The older Hibiki reached up and placed his hand on the transparent metal, mimicking what his son had done. They stood there for a few seconds, silent, staring at each other on opposite sides of the alien alloy. The silence stretched on, and Kasumi sighed sadly at the scene. Before her eyes, Ryouga's expression softened from sadness to open grief.

"I… I'm sorry… Dad," the younger Hibiki said first. "This is my fault. You know it's my fault. They wouldn't have found you, if…"

"And here I thought you knew better by now!" Tetsuya interrupted his son, leaning in closer to look him in the face. "You think this is about you? You think the world revolves around Ryouga Hibiki? Yes, they found us through you, but there was nothing you could have done. No way you could've known."

"If I'd been stronger…"

"It wouldn't have mattered," Tetsuya insisted. "Trust me: it wouldn't have mattered. No one man is an army. No one man can defeat an army. Not you, not me, not even your grandfather… and he was the strongest of us."

Ryouga huffed, and stepped back away from the transparent section of the cell.

"Does it hurt," he asked, "What they did to you?"

"You'd think so…" Tetsuya also stepped back, and shrugged. "But I don't feel any different. They say my liver's stopped working. I'm pretty sure that would kill you, normally, but I feel like I'm your age. Funny, huh? Dying on the inside, and fit as a fiddle? It's quiet in here, though. Must be that dampener thing someone mentioned."

"Ryouga?" Kasumi asked, hoping someone could fill her in. She couldn't help but feel worried about this man, this dying man (how could you live without a liver after all?), who was the father of her poor friend.

"The aliens took my father… turned him," he tried to explain, without giving away anything she wasn't directly allowed to know. "Into something… not totally human. He's turning into an Ethereal."

"Well, not exactly," Tetsuya said from inside the cage, walking over to be closer to where she was standing. "I'd never be caught in one of those gaudy orange robes."

Ryouga whirled on him. "Should you really be taking this so lightly?"

"Working myself into a pit of despair won't exactly help the situation," his father replied in a lackadaisical tone of voice. "I figure the least I can do is cooperate. That way, maybe, one day I'll be able to leave this place and not lose myself again."

He smirked, and continued, "That was one hell of a fight you and your friends gave me, by the way. I still can't believe that kendoist managed to cut my Iron Killing Cloth..."

"Father," Ryouga cut him off, sensing they were running out of time. "I need to talk to you about Akari, and what you said about her before."

"Ah. That." Tetsuya ran his right hand through his hair, and tried to smooth it out a bit to look more presentable. "It was the truth. Ask yourself: what is a person, but the sum of their memories and experiences? Put a dead man's memories in an identical body… will that new person be the same as they were before? If you believe the answer to that is 'yes,' as our alien friends do, then what you call 'Akari Unryu' survives to this day."

"Do you believe that?" Tetsuya asked, because in the end that was what it came to.

"I don't know…" Ryouga's voice was defeated, emotionally exhausted. He cursed silently, and turned away from the cell. "I'm not a theologian. I'm no philosopher. Not by a long shot. What do you want me to say?"

With a snarl, he slammed his fist into one of the walls; it wasn't even dented.

"I said I'd do whatever I could to save her! If there was even a chance of it, I said I'd bring her back..." He squeezed his eyes shut, and pounded the same fist into the wall again. "But when you told me just that… that I could have her back, I knew I had to say no. I couldn't bring her back, not if it meant compromising… dealing… with the things that killed her. No! Not even for Akari! Not for anything! Not for one life and not for a thousand!"

"Ryouga," Tetsuya said slowly, leaning against the clear section of his prison. "I know this isn't what you want to hear, but I think you have to. She's part of them now, literally. There is no separating her from them. If you fight them, if you destroy them, if you somehow silence the Voice… she really will be gone forever. Can you do that?"

His son didn't reply, but thumped his fist against the wall a third time, but with very little force.

"Ryouga!" Tetsuya yelled. "Can you do that?!"

"Hibiki-san, please!" Kasumi tried to insert herself between them, stop the verbal assault…

"I **will** do it," Ryouga spoke up. His voice was hoarse and strained. "I have to…"

He turned slightly, and Kasumi could see wetness in his eyes, fighting to escape.

"I'll set all those stolen memories free."

Tetsuya frowned, but nodded in approval. "You'll give 'em Hell. I know you will. Hibiki's may forgive, but we don't forget."

"And we don't die easily," Ryouga said, conviction in his voice replacing grief. He turned around, and father and son exchanged knowing looks.

Ryouga touched the clear pane again. "Don't you die easily, old man. Mother wouldn't take it well."

Tetsuya did the same, their hands just a centimeter apart. "Same goes for you, son."

They lingered there for a few seconds, before Tetsuya grinned.

"I don't suppose you could smuggle some of your mother's cooking down here?" He asked, and Ryouga grinned back weakly.

"Sorry," the younger Hibiki apologized, though it was only half hearted. He barked out a sad laugh. "I… hardly even remember what mom's cooking tastes like."

"You don't? Well, your mother's not a great cook," Tetsuya replied, smiling more broadly now, his green eyes alight. "But I savored every meal she ever made me. Every one. Next chance you get… you try it for yourself. You'll remember."

Ryouga nodded stiffly.

"Listen.: there are only four more like me out there, Ryouga. Martial Artists made into Trenchards. If they haven't told you already, I want to make sure you know this," Tetsuya pressed on, a grim expression knitting his brows together. "Two of those will be familiar to you, the Amazon and the Doctor, but they are all too far gone by now. There is nothing human inside them. If you face them, don't hesitate. Don't hold back."

"Lieutenant," one of the guards' voices came from the intercom. "Your allotted time has expired. Please step away from Cell 4-C."

Curling his palm into a fist, Tetsuya gently wrapped the wall twice with it. After a second's hesitation, Ryouga repeated the gesture, and father and son parted ways. Ryouga didn't walk away, but his father did approach the strange sphere in the center of his room.

"You know they call this an Entertainment Module?" With a scoff, he kicked it not-too-softly with his foot. "Some alien piece of junk, I call it. Even Mitsuko's phone got HBO! Get going already and make sure someone knows I want a real TV down here!"

Ryouga inclined his head, and turned away from the cell, quickly heading towards Kasumi. Before he reached her, she decided to say her own goodbye. It was only polite, after all. Something about what he had said, though, alarmed her. Ranma and Ryouga had both been evasive when she had asked them about this before, but maybe now one of them would give her a straight answer.

"Hibiki-san," she said, bowing slightly.

"Tendo-san," he bowed back, and she smiled kindly at him. "Please make sure my son doesn't get too lost out there."

"I'll try my best," Kasumi replied, and taking Ryouga's hand, the two headed back the way they came. Or they started to – by the time they hurried to the Cellblock C monitoring station, Kasumi had to let go of Ryouga's hand.

It was growing too hot.

Ryouga's_ ki_ was flaring, not evenly, but in bits and pieces. The bandages around his hands and fingers were turning black, and tiny jets of green and red psionic energy were shooting out at random intervals. The lost boy just stared dumbly at his own mauled hands, even when the bandages began to stain red with blood.

"What?" He curled his fingers. "I… I can't control…?"

He gulped, fighting to contain himself, fighting to keep his eyes closed. He was on the verge of covering his face with his hands when he drew them back, singed. Kasumi could only watch, stunned, as he desperately tried to stamp out the fire by hitting the ground with his palms. Then she saw the tears.

She had seen him cry before, in the same sort of 'waterfall tears' way that her father often despaired, it being more an overly dramatic show than genuine heart wrenching grief. This was something entirely different. The instability of his _ki_ was just a manifestation of his state of mind.

He really needed help, but she knew all too well how he distrusted and disliked the very idea of seeing the base psychiatrist. Unable to just stand and watch, doing nothing, Kasumi approached him. He needed a friend, not just a comrade in arms, not even a rival. He needed someone he could look weak in front of without shame. That was why he had told her about P-chan before. Kasumi knew she had to be that person, and though the flame-like _ki_ sparking out of his hands scared her, she knelt down and reached out to him.

"Kasumi," he gasped, trying to ward her off with the backs of his hands.

"It's alright, Ryouga-kun, it's alright," she said softly and leaned in, resting her forehead against his. This close, she could feel his mental energy keenly, as well as his problem. Emotive _ki_ was inherently unstable and difficult to harness, and Ryouga's was not only raging out of control, and trying to find an outlet out of his body, but it was conflicting and confused. Gradually, he began to relax, and the flow of _ki_ adopted a more natural and ordered flow, partly using her as a circuit. The center of the forehead, where their spiritual pressures met, was a natural pressure point she had learned from reading one of Doctor Tofu's books.

It was just a temporary salve, not a permanent solution.

He gently grasped her shoulders and pushed her away from him. Without the pressure point connection, his spiritual pressure completely overwhelmed hers; severing the circuit she had hastily tried to form. His hands were warm, but normal body temperature, not blazing hot. Quickly, he wiped away the tears he'd shed and closed his eyes as he methodically reconstructed his façade.

"Ryouga-kun…" Kasumi started to talk, tried to think of a way to convince him to find the help he needed to keep from heading towards a complete breakdown.

"This was the first time I've ever lost control like… I mean," he quickly interrupted her. "I'm so sorry… that you had to see me like that." He frowned, and looked off to the side. Kasumi was confused by this, but then realized that he must be searching the room for hidden cameras.

"What's been done to my father, to all those I love, is unforgivable. Thank you, Kasumi," he spoke, obviously, for the benefit of those listening and maybe even watching. "Thank you for being a shoulder to cry on."

Whatever else she had to say to him about what had happened, and about those two Trenchards Tetsuya had spoken of specifically, this wasn't the place. She knew it. He knew it.

"I think we should go," she said. It was something they both could readily and openly agree on. He nodded, and together they left.

* * *

Ranma's appearance for the day's training was not starting things on the right foot. Of course, it couldn't be helped, and it was better to get things all out in the open before the big mission began, but it was still sort of sad. Ranma was such a disturbingly attractive woman.

"Pig-tailed girl…! What a surprise to see you! Find refuge in these arms of mine!"

"Kuno!!"

"Hibiki! Why do _you_ bar my path?"

Ranma stood by the door of the changing room, immersed in his Jyusenkyou girl curse and wearing the same black one piece body glove swimwear they all had on. Ukyou couldn't help but find it strange, even after all this time. Ranma's female body, or rather: the female version of Ranma, as she thought of it. It was also rather strange to see Konatsu in men's wear, looking… like a man. Ah, gender confused martial artists – you had to see it to believe it!

"I am your commanding officer! You will STAND TO!"

Ukyou winced as Ryouga all but yelled in Kuno's face and the swordsman wavered visibly between defiance and increasingly engrained compliance in the face of a CO's orders. The moment Ranma-chan had emerged, Kuno had gone back to his old stupid self, still oblivious to how the beloved 'second love of his life' could have appeared in a top secret military facility, wearing UNETCO issue clothes, while everyone had been waiting for Ranma to show up. She felt a little sorry for the wealthy kendoist, but let India Squad deal with things in their own way.

They simply couldn't have him acting like that on the mission.

"Lieutenant," Kuno managed to say, restraining himself and straightening his back. "No doubt the pigtailed girl is here to see me; why else would she be here? I should…"

"Squaddie!" Never before had Ukyou heard Ryouga use the actual and formal rank of his comrades to put one in line like this. Not even once. The effect of it jarred Kuno visibly.

"I'm going to tell you why she's here!" Ryouga's stepped out from Kuno's line of sight and pointed to the vexed Ranma-chan. "She's here to train. And during the next mission, she'll be there to fight. Why the Hell are you here, Squaddie?! Is it to get in her way, or to contribute to the mission!?"

"I… I didn't think of it like that…" Tatewaki Kuno stammered.

"You listen to me, Kuno." Ryouga grabbed him by the shoulders and looked right into his eyes. "I want you to think of her, treat her, like she was no different than Mousse, or Ryu, or Ukyou or Shampoo. She isn't your pigtailed girl. She's one of our soldiers! Do you get me? Do you understand?"

The so called 'Blue Thunder' closed his eyes and nodded. "I understand, Lieutenant."

Ryouga leaned in, and added, "She's also an officer, like me… so if she gives you an order, you follow it."

"An officer?" Kuno asked, and looked quickly at Ranma-chan again. "But… what about Saotome? Has the rogue been stripped of his command or re-assigned?"

Ukyou nearly face faulted into the pool. How on Earth could he be this dense?

"Let the other Squad worry about him. Ok?" Ryouga let the older fighter go, but still stood in front of him. "You ready to get back to work? Get back with _our_ Squad."

Kuno seemed to waver between a salute and a bow, so he did neither and walked stiffly back to where Ryu and Mousse were shaking their heads.

"Something funny over there?" Ryouga barked at them.

"Nothing funny, Lieutenant!" Ryu snapped back, crisply. Next to him, Mousse also straightened his posture, but said nothing.

"I knew this would happen," Ranma-chan said, walking over. It was been a while since anyone had heard her voice; it was far less authoritative than Ranma had trained his to be over the last two months. Ukyou wondered if it was because the curse was age-specific - that of a drowned young woman. If that was true, then in that form Ranma would always be a 16 year old girl, even when his true form was that of an 18, 20, or even 40 year old man.

"And I told you… I'll take care of it," India Squad's commander replied, trying to keep his voice low.

"So I see, but if you can't…"

"I won't leave one of my men behind," the lost boy hissed. "Not at the start of a mission. Not at the end."

"Fine, fine. I'll leave it to you, then."

Ryouga nodded sharply, and then headed towards his group. "Alright! In the water! I want 32 laps before we start in-armor exercises!"

Immediately, the three men of India Squad jumped in, followed quickly by their leader. They started to swim, and Ranma watched them for a few seconds. All of them had the endurance, but form and technique were not as polished. It had been a long time since either Mousse or Ryouga swam, due to their just-recently cursed curses, and their strokes were powerful but sloppy. Kuno was doing well, and Ranma suspected he'd had a personal trainer at some point, but he lacked the power of the other three.

"Ok, everybody," he (as a she) turned towards the assembled Juliet Squad. "You heard him. I want 34 laps from all of you, and I want you guys to finish before India Squad does! Got it?"

"Got it!" Shampoo's competitiveness was obviously piqued. She headed straight for the cold water of the pool. Konatsu didn't seem as obviously eager, but he too quickly jumped in.

Ukyou, however, walked a few paces towards Ranma-chan.

"Ranma… Lieutenant," she took a deep breath and watched him (or rather: her) face. She had to know, had to see, how what she said here affected him.

"What is it?" Ranma prompted, eager to get to those laps himself.

She steeled herself.

"If this work we're doing meant canceling the engagement between us, would you agree to it?" She echoed his words from before, during Operation Ghost Wire. "You said you would. I've thought a lot about that… about what you said."

Ranma-chan's face became knitted with concern, and Ukyou shook her head.

"I know what you want, Ranma, and I want you to know I'd follow you anywhere. So…" She blinked, but to her relief there weren't any tears in her eyes. She had readied herself for this. She wouldn't let him think she was anything but thinking rationally.

"So I'm ending our engagement, at least until this war is over," she said, glad the words were finally out in the open. It felt like a weight off her shoulders; a true and honest cathartic relief. "I've gotten Shampoo to lay-off, too, though she'll never admit to as much. Like that jackass said: we're your soldiers."

In Ranma's face, she saw the proof she had always needed. Deep down, past the free food she gave him, past the attention he often lamented but still secretly enjoyed, in his heart of hearts she could see it. He'd never wanted to get engaged, probably to any of them.

He was _relieved_.

"Ukyou…"

"We'd better hurry up if we're going to beat India Squad." She couldn't let him speak, couldn't let him finish. She didn't want to hear his thanks for what she had done, and she couldn't bear the thought that she had misread him, and thrown away her engagement for nothing. So she ran for the pool and jumped in the water.

The last still on dry land, Ranma-chan made a purling sigh.

"First Akane and now this," the buxom red-head grumbled. "Man, women are just one big headache."

* * *

December 3rd, one hour to midnight

Ryouga stamped out the faintly burning cigarette that had fallen to the floor next to the body of the man he had just killed. He didn't know the man's name, didn't know where he was from or what he wanted to do with his life. UNETCO had identified him as complicit in aiding the enemy, and he had been in the way. Now he was dead, along with a dozen others, and many more to come.

"Obstacles are for killing." Shampoo had said that, two years ago, and it had stuck in his head. He tried to imagine that what he had just done was a terrible thing, and that he should feel terrible for having done it. But… he didn't. He didn't feel anything in regards to the men he'd killed. There was only single minded determination.

There truly was no turning back now, for any of them.


	49. Winter Triangle I

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. The UNETCO timetable moves ever forward, but a new complication has arisen as the alien forces in the Far East surge out in unexpected numbers and with surprising fury. India and Juliet Squads have been tasked with taking the _Procyon_, a cargo ship operated by the alien enthralled Sirius Group. For the first time, the terrible power of the Nerima Crew is about to be directed at fellow humans. On a dark December night, Operation Winter Triangle officially began.

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia  
**Chapter XVII  
_Winter Triangle  
_

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

It was a little room in a nondescript hotel on the coast of China.

But there was a marketplace nearby, with a view over it, so he was content. Below, the bustle of activity lasted well into the night, as the cusp of the sun set over the horizon. He barely noticed the dark shroud that fell over the world, or the multitude of lights that stood out amidst it. Light was no longer relevant to his perception of the world.

To any who looked up, by chance, and saw him standing by the window, watching… he would have appeared almost human. Here, the darkness was his ally, shielding that thing which would set him apart from the attentions of the curious. He never moved, and no one stared or pointed. He may as well have been Betty, his old mock skeleton from the clinic, staring out from the shadows with wide unblinking eyes.

He rather liked the comparison, besides. It was… genuinely amusing.

Then he heard a muffled curse from inside the small hotel room, and slowly, Doctor Tofu lowered his glasses over his eyes and turned to see what the problem was. Not that he didn't have a good guess. A few seconds later, Cologne emerged out of the bathroom, looking frustrated. He'd been right in his assumption: it was _that _problem again.

Midway up her right thigh, he could see the blemish. The skin was dry and pale and starting to flake. Even with the glasses on, he could see the patch of necrotic tissue nestled among the muscle. Blood flow to the area was almost nonexistent. To a normal person, it would have been a crippling and terrible wound, and exceedingly painful to endure while standing.

"You should just let it rot away," he said in calm, doctorly, measured tones.

"Are you going to help me or not?" she snapped, avoiding the question and sitting down at the edge of the bed in the main room. Cologne's youthful body was otherwise flawless, and she sat on the bed wearing nothing save a black pair of panties and a like-colored bra. Privately, he found her façade of physical perfection slightly annoying, but there was no point in saying as much to the proud and aggressive Amazon woman.

Sitting down and placing his hands over the blemish on her thigh, he said, and not for the first time, "Focus your ki; let me direct it…"

She closed her eyes, and he saw the tendrils of energy creep through sinew and bone. Inching his glasses up with one hand, so they lay nestled among his thinning hair, he could see it all so clearly. Not just the flesh and the bone, and not just the _ki_, but the very makings of the universe. He saw molecules and atoms of different weights and configurations, in as many colors as there were numbers. If the Gods existed, they would have eyes like his had become.

His hands moved deftly on her skin. He could see the pressure points, the old static ones he had learned, and now others: new ones no one had known of before. He saw the pressure points that moved with every beat of the heart, every change of mood… he saw the ones on the surface, and the ones deep in the muscle, or buried in bone.

No earthly or even alien medicine could reverse the processes slowly undoing Cologne's body. It had been remade, from the beginning, to fail. Like a child learns to crawl, and then walk, and then run so she was to learn to survive, and then thrive, bereft of a physical shell. Her soft, creamy skin would peel and flake like dried asbestos. Her perfectly toned and shaped muscles would wither and shrivel away. Her bones would crack and fail. If one cared for appearances, her perfect young body would – in only a few more months – be far more hideous than she had been before she had been abducted.

Beneath his fingers and tender ministrations, Cologne's great power began to work its miracle. He could see the branching network of capillaries expand, feeding fresh blood. He could see new tissue grow, displacing and quickly consuming the necrotic tissue. As it did so, he couldn't help but marvel at the natural control and quantity of _ki_ she had at her disposal. This woman… was truly the equal of any Ethereal, even one of the Ancients. The recent addition of alien portions of her brain had only unleashed the full potential locked within her mind and genetic code.

Cologne had boasted in his presence that she was the greatest Amazon warrior of her generation. The truth, he suspected, was that Cologne was likely the most gifted Amazon to ever have lived. In their prime, she and Happosai would have likely been awe inspiring. And that young Cologne, that human woman, would be like a plaything to the creature she had now become. With anyone else under his hands, the treatment would have taken longer than an hour. With Cologne, her leg was restored in just seven minutes and fifteen seconds.

He noted that it was twenty seconds shorter than the last time had taken.

"You're getting better at it," he remarked, and slipped his glasses back down onto the bridge of his nose. "How pointless."

Cologne didn't move her body, but she did toss her long hair contemptuously behind her. "I'd take care of it myself, but…" she frowned a bit, disliking admitting weakness or ignorance.

The truth of the matter was that she didn't have his medical training or knowledge, and she didn't have his eyes either. Even if she could manipulate her own pressure points, she couldn't find them, constantly shifting in the body. The failing of her body was not something that could be corrected normally, not even by a Master of _ki_ healing like herself.

"I know, but it should not concern you. Who is going to see it, anyway?" he smiled, just a little. "Besides your doctor, of course."

"You don't know what it's like, Tofu," she replied, tucking in her legs and stretching them out on the bed like a cat. "You can't imagine… growing old… losing everything. And then getting it all back!"

"I would've thought that living as long as you have would have made this easier," he argued, standing up and slowly heading back to the window.

"I was always meant to be beautiful," she explained, reclining on the bed, her long dark hair splayed out over the pillows. "When I went through the Breaking Point training without even a scar, I knew it was destiny. The strongest, the most skilled, and the most beautiful. For so long I was… perfect…"

She opened her eyes and looked up at the ceiling, remembering. "Did you know I managed to put off actually looking my age until I was almost seventy? I was still the jewel of the Amazon village. But then…"

Her face tightened up, her frown deepening.

Tofu, however, just smirked. "The natural human body is also built to inevitably fail. Consider yourself lucky that you never had a stroke. _Ki_ healing and life extension is impossible with brain damage."

"I searched all over the world for a technique to give me just a few more decades. In the end, it came back to him… Happosai… he had the answer, damn him." Cologne's expression wavered slowly between frustration, and anger, and finally a certain cruel amusement. "But I'd be damned if I used one of his techniques, no matter how effective it was. And in the end, how appropriate! It was his death."

Tofu was less amused, though he had done the deed at the time.

"I doubt the men of the world would have slept soundly had you adopted Happosai's method of life extension," he said, and went back to watching the people below in the market. Seemingly changed by having her perfect body restored to working order, Cologne went off to take a shower, leaving him in peace. As for himself, he would not shower nor bathe. It was pointless, now, and irrelevant given what his body would become.

Perhaps, when he was ready, he would bathe in the vacuum of space, and the burning radiation of a stellar mass. Such a liberating experience would surely wash away the last of his lingering humanity, and leave his mind free… free to enjoy sensation in its purest form. He was close to that already, but he wanted more. Sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell… all would be gone, all would be as one: one primal and fundamental sense, a single unified and perfect perception of the universe!

It would be the culmination of a life spent looking… searching… for meaningful existence. His parents had been traditionalists, and given his natural talent for acupressure and acupuncture, it had been natural for him to enter that field. He had dreamed, a lifetime ago, about working to bridge the gap between traditional medicine and the modern western model he had learned. He had perceived a right and meaningful life to be one that only helped others, never harmed them, and that benefited mankind.

How foolish he had been. How blind!

What was humanity but a flock of sheep on a distant mountaintop? A teeming mass of arrogant meat, walking and talking and eating and shitting through life? It perplexed the aliens so… that the vast bulk of humanity remained fit for nothing but experiments and harvesting. None of the others had, at the same time, both leaped forward and lagged behind. For centuries, the Mind had watched and waited, confused even, and undecided as to whether to keep mankind as a harvest species or to elevate them and accept them as worthy servants.

Caught between Animal and God, there stood Man.

Looking down, there was much the Doctor's dead eyes could see. That woman walking with her young daughter… he knew her age, knew she had caught the cold two weeks ago, he knew she had broken her leg when she was six or seven. He knew, within a margin of error and barring outside interference, when she would die, and from what. Her mental powers were nearly non-existent. What he didn't know… was why.

Helping humanity as a whole was pointless. What was important, what did have value and substance, was making humanity into something worth saving in a post-stellar perspective. This was what the Mind wanted. If humans became more important in the grand scheme of things, then it would as well. If this meant only one tenth of a percent of humanity was saved, and the rest kept alive solely for their flesh or their wombs, then that was still surely right and meaningful. It was simply necessary to divorce "humanity" from the vast majority of "human beings."

The Mind hummed with pleasure at his thoughts, always there… always.

Cologne emerged from the shower looking placated and refreshed, a too-small towel wrapped tightly around her torso. He had long been aware of how Cologne's great granddaughter, Shampoo, tended to have little problem drawing attention to her body. By this point, he figured it had to be a cultural trait most Amazons likely shared, and very briefly, he entertained the notion that she was even…

His eyes saw it.

"I see." He looked away; just a glance was enough to access, in totality, her physiological status "You had plans to go out tonight. Don't even consider it."

"It did cross my mind," Cologne admitted. "But I know better. It is typical, though, that I finally get back my perfect body… and I don't even get to do anything with it."

"You indulge that 'new body' of yours too much as it is."

"Don't tell me that part of you has rotted away as well, Doctor?" Cologne slinked up behind him. "What about little Kasumi? Just the mere mention of her name used to send you into a nervous fit."

She reached over his shoulder and placed her hand over his heart. "Not even a flutter for an old flame?"

He turned to face her, his glasses off, black holes where eyes had once been.

"Love? Lust?" he asked with a sneer. "I loved Kasumi, from the moment we met, when she was just a young girl. I dreamed of when we could finally be together. I always thought she would complete me… complete my life."

"But…" he slowly reached up, and removed Cologne's hand from over his heart. "My heart no longer beats. Why would it flutter?"

Cologne smirked at him, and took a step back. "She'll die, you know."

"A great many will die," he replied, coldly. "But tell me, Cologne, are you trying to take your mind off what is about to happen by bothering me with trivial matters from the past? It is… unlike you."

The ancient old crone in the young body still managed a cackle or two.

"My Doctor, when I think about what is about to happen, far from wanting to be distracted…" Her smirk grew, and her violet eyes gleamed. "I want to celebrate! I only wish I could be there to see it. A building that has fallen into disrepair… is better off burning to the ground than falling apart."

* * *

"When I think back to it… my most vivid memories are of the sound of broken bones… the smell of blood, sweat and shit. It was the worst night of my life."

* * *

The suit's sensors recorded the water all around them at a chilly nineteen degrees Celsius. Inside the stealth suit, however, it hovered around perfect body temperature. They had been dropped discretely off in the middle of the sea and pointed at the target of Operation Winter Triangle. It was upon entry into the water that the mission officially began, and their systems linked up with Command and Control.

Tatewaki Kuno sucked in a mouthful of air and tightened his grip on the underwater leader device he and Mousse had been given. It would do most of the work taking them to their target, conveying them under the waves without leaving a trace of a wake on the surface. He tried not to think about the bottomless abyss of the sea below them, and what could possibly be lurking in those lightless depths.

Allegedly, Ranma Saotome (that currish dog) had swum from Japan to China during a training trip, and Kuno steadfastly refused to feel any apprehension that a rogue like Ranma had previously overcome. If any terrors from the deep arose to challenge the scion of House Kuno, they would taste first and foremost the edge of his sword. Though, admittedly, wielding it effectively underwater would be somewhat difficult. Next to him, Mousse also clung tightly to the robotic device pulling them through the water, and supplying them with oxygen.

Seeing his Chinese comrade, Kuno quickly focused on the mission at hand. He was getting distracted, and that was (he had come to learn) not very professional. As a modern day samurai, he had to remain as focused and honed as his blade. Indeed, this mission more than any other would test his samurai character. He would prove to those he had given his word to that he could be relied upon, and that he would execute his orders, regardless of their nature.

It was today that he would take his first human life.

"Don't think about it so much," Mousse had said, before they had jumped into the water. "Just do it."

For sixteen minutes, they cruised under the water, dark starlight sky above, depthless black below. There were no lights in the water with them, and Kuno could only check the progress of the rest of India and Juliet Squads via a positional display on his helmet HUD. As the minutes passed, he tried to not think, morally, about what was to come. Instead, he went over the mission again and again in his mind. He had studied the maps of the ship they had been given by Intel, and he had practiced over and over for this moment. He was at the peak of his abilities, fighting for a just cause, and on an important mission.

Mousse nudged him.

They were in position, and the underwater machine they had been using turned itself off. Cautiously, the two headed for the surface for a visual check on their location. Just barely, he could make out two other human shapes near the surface. He ignored them for the moment. Everyone had their objectives, and stuck to them. Just a couple hundred feet away, he could see the vast metal flank of the _Procyon_. It was a massive thing, even this far away, crowned by looming crane towers, and the main above-decks bridge castle.

He and Mousse quickly began to swim towards their designated position, discarding the air tube connecting their helmets to the underwater leader device. They swam the rest of the way with careful strokes, minimizing their surface wake and impression. Soon, the others began to report in that they were in position. Mousse and Kuno waited, floating near the almost vertical steel side of the _Procyon_.

"Blue One." Ryouga's voice came in from the secure wireless. "Go."

Kuno and Mousse exchanged brief looks, before latching onto the hull of the cargo ship. They had been given devices to use to scale the side of the ship, and while he had no idea how they worked (they seemed like ninja or thief's equipment to him, and no respectable person should delve too deeply into such fields), they did nonetheless. Carefully, he began to climb, tightening his grip on the device to activate it and lock it in place, and loosening his grip to make it release. He only had two of the things, one to fit in the palm of each hand, and thus relied entirely on upper body strength to ascend.

Luckily, for one in perfect physical shape as he was, and possessed of that indomitable and insurmountable _Kuno spirit_, it was mere child's play to reach the top. Of course, Mousse also seemed to have little difficulty, but Kuno was sure he had had even _less_ difficulty than that. In fact he had had none. No difficulty. He made a mental note to be sure to phrase it that way when he wrote his report, post-mission.

Kuno was just pulling himself up and over the edge of the ship when he saw Mousse move in the corner of his vision. The Master of Hidden Weapons flipped acrobatically over the edge, and straightened his arm out sharply. Before the Chinese fighter had even landed softly on his feet, a body was being pulled – retracted even – through the air towards him. The victim was clutching his neck with one hand, the other snapped awkwardly behind his back. He had never even had the chance to draw the assault rifle that hung, from a strap, over his shoulder.

Mousse motioned Kuno to move to the right, while his other hand clenched into a fist. Kuno could guess that Mousse had used wires from his sleeves to snare the other man, but as he moved, he couldn't help but watch as his squadmate reeled in the poor mercenary. Blood was running in a long thick line from his neck, but despite his open mouth, not a sound escaped to alert the rest of the ship's crew.

Mousse made a quick motion with his hand, and the man fell to the ground, still tangled tightly in razor wire, and still silently bleeding and choking to death. Mousse gently pushed him with his foot, hiding him in a dark corner. It was grim work, and Kuno reached down to the hilt of his new sword.

Their first mission, as 'designation Blue Team,' was to clear the front of the bridge tower. While they were doing so, the two man 'Red' team was clearing the rear of the ship, while 'Gold' and 'Green' took the front. Kuno moved quickly, searching the dark shadows that drew across the ship's deck with technology-assisted night vision. It seemed like only a few seconds after he started, he saw someone, an unidentified non-friendly, moving in from behind some equipment kept under a tarp.

Kuno felt the edge of his thumb brush past the _tsuba_, or hand guard, of his sword, even as he began to silently run. His fingers softly moved down the length of the hilt, before reaching a spot he knew almost instinctively. It was there, where his hand just encircled the very end of the sword's hilt, that he began his draw. Kendo was his specialty, and his practice, but he knew several different sword styles directly applicable to actual kenjutsu. The man before him had no armor to speak of, but in his arms, he held a formidable weapon: the AK 74, the 5.45mm rounds from which could easily penetrate over 60 percent of the surface area of Kuno's stealth suit.

He adjusted his stance, and struck, aiming for the _Migi Nagi_ or left waist, as he had practiced countless thousands of times. Taking a step after the strike had been followed through, Kuno reached in and pushed aside the other man's right arm making it physically impossible to hit the swordsman with it without a severe change in angle. It was a sound precaution Kuno felt more than justified taking. He had been shot once before (though that had been by a plasma rifle), and never intended to be so again.

The rifle never got off a shot, but the man's left arm did shake fiercely as his body divided in half just above the pelvis. The cut had been clean, almost surgically so, and the very next heartbeat, a spray of crimson seemed to erupt in every direction. It was not exactly what Kuno had expected or imagined. There was a single great spurt, and then only a trickle that arced through the air as the upper torso fell back and away. Kuno bit back a hiss of revulsion as he quickly hopped away, getting some distance. There was blood everywhere and he didn't want to touch it, even though his environmentally sealed stealth suit.

And for some reason, he remembered when Kodachi, just a little girl, had killed a snake in her garden and taken it to show him. He had been repulsed then, and he felt that same thing now, directed at himself. He stumped back another step, and steadied himself against a metal pipe that rose up out of the floor. It was then that a new feeling coursed through him.

He felt…

It had been so easy, so effortless almost, to kill that man. One single move. One single strike. The exotic alloy sword had gone through his flesh and bone like it had been warm butter. All those times he had been humbled in battle, by Ranma especially, he had never really… considered…

He was strong.

No: he had known he was strong. He had been strong. He was, after all, one of the world's finest kendoists. But this was different. He briefly closed his eyes, and remembered. He was samurai. He had always felt that way, always strived for that ideal: to be that warrior poet he had so deeply admired. Having taken a man's life like this, could he still think of himself as a kendoist at all? Could he go back to a_ sport_ like that? His strength was something new and terrible now.

Opening his eyes, he snapped his sword out, sending a lick of blood flying into a nearby wall. His heart was beating so much faster than the exertion warranted. His mind was racing, the rote memory of the mission dragging his flesh and blood along for the ride. He moved through the route planned out beforehand, leading up to a door – the only one in this side of the ship leading into the main deck level of the tower.

"In position," he said, voice betraying his eagerness. While Mousse finished clearing the outside fore of the castle, and Ryouga the rear, he and Ryu were to begin the assault of the tower itself.

"Samurai," he mentally reminded himself. "Samurai. Samurai!"

The go signal came, and he opened the door.

There were two men inside, just getting their weapons ready after having come up from above decks. Both were sailors, by the looks of them. Ryu was closest to them, having entered from the aft door. A single vacuum blade beheaded one, and crippled the other for life, before leaving a clean slice in the metal wall behind them. At that moment, another man opened the door to what Kuno recognized (from his memorization of the floor plans) as the sick bay.

_Kesagiri_.

The downward diagonal cut entered the man's body just to the right of his left shoulder. What bone was in the way may as well have been bundled straw. Kuno's sword was all but unbreakable, with an edge that was virtually impossible to physically deform. Through his hands, Kuno could feel his progress: first, the clavicle, then the third _vertebrosternal rib_ on the left side, and then in, cleaving the heart in two. Kuno took a step back, drawing his sword down and out of the man's body, completing the perfect cut.

_Samurai_.

He was Samurai; this was what he had been born to be!

Looking into the sickbay behind the fallen sailor, Kuno didn't see any other men, or anything of interest. He left Ryu to finish clearing the floor, and guarding it against reinforcements from below, while he continued on up and towards the bridge. Stepping over the two men Ryu had killed, he carefully made his way up the metal stairway. Reaching the top, he quickly identified the two doors, along a short L-shaped hallway, that lead to the electronics/repair room, and what Intel guessed was the normal ship's armory. He primed and tossed a proximity grenade down the hall, denying access to both doors.

Rounding and heading up the next stairway, located 'above' the previous one; he was rewarded by the sound of gunfire, and someone cursing in what he assumed to be Thai. There were living quarters on this level, so running into mercenaries wasn't exactly surprising. Reaching down to one of the pockets by his thigh, he fished out a small canister of tear gas. Pitching it underhand up the stairs, he counted down to six.

A second after the grenade went off, filling the room in a cloud of thick eye irritating smoke; he bounded up the stairs, and saw one of the mercenaries (wearing grey fatigues, rather than the work clothes of the sailors), shielding his face and standing behind the cover of a doorway. He was about three meters away. Kuno instantly fell to a crouch, arm extended in a single handed thrust aimed for the _sakakaze_ point, between the legs. As expected, the man cringed at the initial contact, bringing his head forward.

Kuno straightened out, standing back up with legs only slightly bent, and twisting his wrist, he sliced upwards. His left foot took a step forwards, and the corresponding arm and hand came up to support the strike by pushing upwards on the blunt edge of the sword. The upwards strike opened the right half of the man's neck.

But Kuno's (somewhat nascent) _sakkijutsu_ was still warning him of danger. He could guess that more shots were coming, and that they were from behind him, and the other door facing the stairs. He pivoted on the balls of his feet, and summoned his _Kokuzan_ or 'Sky Arc Decapitation' technique. He preferred to use it cutting upwards, but in this case, his momentum was downwards. The sword in his hands hummed a soft melody of a _tachikaze_, like the sound of a chiming pitchfork. The smoke-filled air in front of him wavered, just as shots rang out.

They hit the "solid air" (as Kuno liked to think of it), and veered off course or ricocheted. The shield would only last for a second or two, however, and Kuno set his stance before beginning his most infamous move. It was the very same that he had used on Ranma, two years ago, and even at close range it had failed to defeat the pigtailed martial artist. But here, against normal humans?

His upper body blurred as he began to strike at the air. The shield formed by the _Kokuzan_ in front of him dissipated, and in its place, lances of piercing overpressure flew through the air. Within a body length or so, they were powerful enough to crack solid stone. Twelve or thirteen feet away, they still retained enough force to knock a man off his feet, and punch holes in him. Immediately, one of the mercenaries cried, and fell backwards. The other screamed, and withdrew back into the other room behind him.

Racing towards the door, Kuno quickly delivered a killing blow to the man prone (but still breathing) on the floor, and stepped into the officer's quarters. It was clearly meant for two men, with bunks one above the other. The rest of the room stored personal effects. Kuno quickly saw the man who had survived the previous exchange pointing a handgun at him. His right arm was bleeding badly, and hung limply by his side. He was trying to aim with his left hand, but it was plain he wasn't used to it.

His finger was just a half second too slow.

Grabbing a towel off one of the beds, Kuno cleaned his sword with it and hurriedly left the room (and its dead occupant) behind him. There was one more floor. After peeking in on the other officer's quarters, he headed upstairs without resistance. From the ship's schematics, he knew the two main rooms on the third level were the Captain's Quarters and the Command Center and Radio Room. Above that was the bridge. The Captain would be in one of those, for sure.

"Zero Phase," Kuno said, addressing his sword and activating the concealed switch in the hilt. Instantly, the memory metal reformed itself into a blunt _bokken_. He had more than a few things to take care of here, but first he had to find the Captain. He kicked in the door to the radio room first, knocking it off its metal hinges. Sure enough, there the man was, along with some other younger man, probably the radio operator.

Both immediately drew handguns on him.

Kuno's sword was still an instant faster, and it struck like lightning, knocking aside the Captain's colt semi-automatic, even as the swordsman stepped to the side, avoiding the radio operator's own arc of fire. The Captain's .38 Super went off, pointed in the wrong direction, the first two shots hitting the wall, and the third intercepting the radio operator's face with predictable results. The previous two bullets ricocheted in the small room, and another ended up hitting some wall mounted electronics with a spray of sparks.

The Captain was on the verge of cursing when Kuno's gauntleted fist nearly caved his face in. He slumped, out like a light, and would have hit the floor if Kuno hadn't caught him. The kendoist's heart was still beating like mad, and he felt powerful enough to march into an alien battleship and take it single handedly. It took a few seconds, just standing there, before he realized it: he'd accomplished his part of the mission.

Unless someone called for his help, he was almost done.

It was kind of… disappointing.

"I have my target," Kuno announced over the secure comm. "Moving onto secondaries."

There was little (essentially no) excessive chatter on this mission, he noticed.

"Good work, Kuno," Ryouga's response came, just when he was wondering when one would. That was it, though.

Acting without further distraction, he turned the ship's Captain onto his chest, and bound his hands together behind him with plastic ties. He then quickly checked in on the bridge (empty), and came back down the stairs. As expected, the Captain's quarters had a lock on the door, and it wasn't open. Kuno was tempted to try breaking the door down, but an impulse told him to check the Captain's pockets first, and sure enough he found a small electronic key card there.

His battle fever had all but faded by the point he opened the door, though it sounded like some of his team members were having an interesting time. The Captain's Quarters, as expected, were private and relatively spacious. Not that he was one to look at the effects and come to any great revelation; his job here was just to find the Captain's personal computer or laptop. Sure enough, there it was: a small black tower, and a good sized black flat screen monitor. He made sure it was on, and found one of the USB ports on the front.

"Command, this is Tatewaki. I am inserting the data probe now," he announced, addressing the distant men and women watching his every move. He withdrew a small electronic device, the size and shape of those "flash drives" he'd seen people use back at college. He'd never used one himself, but he had been briefed on what to do for this mission.

Plug it in.

A few seconds later, a female voice answered him, "Looks like we have contact. We're cracking the password as we speak."

"...Nabiki Tendo?" Kuno recognized her voice instantly. "Why am I not surprised?"

* * *

Hundreds of miles away, sitting at her desk in Seiran Mountain's Signal Intelligence Division, Nabiki smirked at his comment.

"Surprised?" she asked with a chuckle, watching the feed come in from the data probe. It was now connected to both the _Procyon_ Captain's computer, and one of the isolated mainframes in Seiran specifically set aside for hacking and data retrieval. Soon, all their hidden little secrets would be at her fingertips.

"Imagine getting paid to do this!" she said with a light hearted laugh. "How could I possibly refuse?"


	50. Winter Triangle II

"Imagine getting paid to do this!" Nabiki exclaimed with a light hearted laugh. "How could I possibly refuse?"

Of course, it wasn't just her. Truth be told, she was just a data coordinator. The data probe Kuno had inserted into the Captain's computer was really just an uplink to the India Squad transceiver on Kuno's back, and built into his stealth suit. It was then sent to her department, where powerful cryptography programs quickly cut through any opposing password protection on a different, isolated computer system. Before her eyes, the eight digit password was cracked in under thirty seconds.

From there, the task was divided among three groups. The first scanned the computer, and ensured no back hacks, viruses or worms posed a threat to their operation. The second copied, uploaded, and did a preliminary database search on everything on the distant computer's hard drive. The third group worked to hack into any remaining folders, and the next major obstacle: the wireless computer network on the _Procyon_.

She worked mostly with the second group, uploading and sorting the information from the data probe. The hard part was searching quickly through megabytes or gigabytes of data for anything of use to the immediate mission, or that could be used within the immediate timeframe elsewhere in the world. Nabiki's eyes darted from one computer monitor to the next, sorting through four different search algorithms.

"Bingo!" she identified a deleted file, and quickly restored it, bringing up the display so it took up half of one of the screens. She tapped a button on her headset. "I've got a report on something dated December 1st, and some kind of rendezvous. Forwarding it now."

She highlighted the relevant data, and sent it along for a more thorough analysis. There, the date would be linked with any suspicious activity detected on that time, or extrapolated by time and place. If anything relevant could be gleaned from what she had found, the data hounds working in SigInt would sniff it out. Soon, her own search parameters began to include other computers in the network they had gained access to.

It was all a matter of knowing what searches to run, what to look for, and that intangible aspect of what to expect. She had been told, on the day of her transfer, that "experience was what was most important" in the field she had chosen to enter, and to compliment her initial psionic training, she had been run through simulations for hours, taxing her mind and even her eyes. Still, she had persevered. The men and women of India and Juliet Squads didn't know it, or at least likely didn't think of it, but in her own way, Nabiki Tendo was fighting alongside them.

Her eyes narrowed, as she pulled together traces of information on how much the sailors (and Thai mercenaries) on board the ship were being paid. Doing some mental calculations, she could guess at the number on board. It led to a related bit of data, and some interesting notes and figures regarding certain safety equipment…

But what on Earth would they need all that fire suppressant gear for?

* * *

A man could get spoiled, wearing impenetrable armor and wielding weapons that burned hotter than the surface of the sun. Or at least, Mousse felt he had gotten a little spoiled by it. But then, his fighting style was heavily reliant on his gear, so when some of his favorite new toys were taken from him, on the grounds that they violated UNETSO's precious "Section Seven" … it left him feeling just a bit naked. He had been given his pick of so called "conventional" arms for the mission, but once in the thick of things, he'd found that the _old ways_ were often still the best.

A trio of stainless steel throwing knives buried in his target's skull, one so deeply that it came out the back of his head, scraping against the wall behind him as he fell to the floor. He then turned and watched passively, as Ryu speared his opponent with his right hand, slicing through cartilage, muscle and bone to impale the man's heart. To make such a clean cut, as if the hand itself was really a giant blade, the _Dokuja Tanketsu Sho_, or Poison Snake Deep Hole Blow) was truly an impressive technique. As Ryu withdrew his hand, and avoided the spray of gore from the wound, Mousse turned away.

Behind the Chinese fighter, Ryouga slowly walked out of the ship's galley, his left arm covered in blood up to the elbow. His face was hidden behind the three eyed helmet that was an integral part of the stealth suit, the third optic being used for the expanded vision modes. Mousse silently wondered what Ryouga was thinking – both squad leaders had been very quiet today, and without their prompting, everyone else was inclined to keep their mouths shut, too.

'He's internalizing his battle aura,' Mousse thought, this close to his commander. 'If he's purposefully hiding his emotional state, then…'

"Incoming message!" a display on his HUD warned. "Priority One!"

"Attention," the voice of Command and Control spoke to them, but Mousse didn't recognize this operator's voice. "All Winter Triangle Operatives, please be aware of the likely existence of incendiary weapons in the lower levels of the ship. The possibility of encountering improvised devices incorporating either high pressure napalm, white phosphorus, or Triethylaluminium is around 80."

"Ooooh?" Mouuse mused, surprised and rather fascinated by the news. Triethylaluminium was a powerful compound used as an ignition source in rocket and jet engines. For a short time, he'd considered using it in his own flame-based special technique, the _Ikkatsu Kakudo Hou_ or Enraged Male Phoenix Roar. It would be interesting to see how others used it here. He would have to be mindful of any potential traps.

"Ryu," Ryouga asked, pointedly.

"That's all of them," Ryu confirmed, checking in the large crew's quarters below-decks.

"Proceed to Blue Three," India Squads commander said, facing Mousse. The Hidden Weapons Master nodded. Blue Three meant Kuno was to take the captured Captain to the extraction point, while Mousse went on to begin demolitions work and engineering the sinking of the _Procyon_.

"Control," he spoke normally into his helmet microphone. "This is Mu Tzu. I am ready to begin demolition of the target."

"Patching you through now," Control replied curtly. Nearby, Ryu and Ryouga continued on downstairs.

"This is Lieutenant Stirling," a man with a distinctly American accent picked up the conversation. "I've got all your data right here and the structural weak points for the ship. Let's take it nice and slow, now, ok?"

"Yes, sir," Mousse answered. This man was an officer, after all.

"It says here you're carrying eight M112s… that can't be right…?"

"I actually am carrying that many, sir."

A pause. "Really? Damn, son!"

Mousse just chuckled "That's not even the half of it, sir."

"Well, let's take care of the boiler room, first. We can make due with just two M112s in there, if you can reach the right points."

Access to the boiler room was through a separate staircase, behind a heavy sealed door. This one probably shouldn't be kicked in, or else it would just jam. Mousse carefully tested the lock, and sure enough, it was open. That was good – it saved the time and trouble of having SigInt hack the code. Turning the handle and unlocking the heavy door, he headed down the flight of steps, taking note of the broken light that hung from the ceiling.

Getting to the bottom, his _sakkijutsu_ was already a silent presence in his mind. For him, it came as a tense of wrongness, and a bad taste in the back of his mouth. He enhanced his low light vision, and looked around. Normally his vision was terrible, but with corrective and up-to-date prescription optics, and the other gear built into his helmet, he could see the face of a coin from forty feet away. Well, maybe that was a _slight_ exaggeration…

Kneeling, he found a wire wedged into the door seal.

"Trap?" he wondered aloud.

"Could be," Lieutenant Stirling concurred. "Check the grating in the floor…"

* * *

Shampoo looked down at her prey, perched high on the upper scaffold of one of the cargo cranes. Behind her helmet HUD, she narrowed her eyes at the man far below, weaving desperately between the cargo containers on deck, like a rat darting through a maze. Shampoo smiled – if he was truly a rat, than that made her an owl.

Taking two light steps, she veritably danced off the end of the crane.

It was difficult to admit, even to herself, but she wasn't a hundred percent sure of picking off the man below with her rifle. For a few seconds, she had been content to watch and weigh her options. Rolling in midair, she reached behind her and withdrew a long combat knife. Despite the vertical drop, her feet alighted softly and soundlessly on the red and black cargo container directly behind her target. Her grip on the knife tightened, a hint of the edge reflecting the light from the moon.

On the ground below, the man turned sharply to the right, and then all the way around. At the slightest hint of movement, the frightened mercenary let loose a barrage of automatic fire. In almost any other environment, in almost any other fight, he would have been considered more than capable. But his fear and his only casual level of personal training were his twin dooms in this one terrible scenario.

As he reached for a grenade strapped to his chest, a hand came in from the side, catching his weapon just above the grip, and the stock. Turning his head in surprise and fear, emotions easily visible in his wide brown eyes, he came face to face with her.

"Slow," she said, and pulled the weapon in her grip down and to the side, locking his hand in the handle, and against the butt of the rifle. She side stepped, twisting his arm with an audible crack, and locking it behind him. Shampoo's technique was flawless, and compared to her, the man had all the strength and experience of an infant.

His arm broke, and a second later, she shouldered him into the steel wall of a cargo container, breaking his nose and spraying blood over the burnished metal. His finger spasmed, and the AK 74 fired several rounds harmlessly into the ground, a dozen feet away. Purposefully, her as yet unused left arm came up, the knife in hand. She opened his throat and quickly avoided the resulting carnage, not letting more than a drop hit her stealth suit.

It wasn't his fault he was dead.

Compared to the soldiers in XCOM, compared to any of the aliens, his reflexes and abilities were simply not comparable. The aliens, it should be said, were uniformly faster than any normal human being, with better reflexes, better aim, and in many cases, they were stronger as well. Only the very best of the best stood a chance against them. What was a man like this, then? Against a normal XCOM soldier his chances would have been grim enough, since Section Seven narrowed the technology gap XCOM could use. Instead, the poor fool faced an Amazon Warrior, the finest of the _Joketsuzoku _tribe.

She cleaned the knife on the dead man's pants and put it back into the sheath strapped to her right arm. Still, she Shampoo found herself unhappy with things.

"You should be right on top of it," an annoying voice reminded her. "The Satellite feed is reading the ship's deck as clear, so you can focus on finding the hangar."

"Do you really find it necessary to remind me of my mission every minute…" Shampoo grumbled, looking around. "Mercenary girl?"

Nabiki Tendo scoffed at that. "Just a friendly reminder, Shampoo."

The Chinese Amazon gritted her teeth at the woman's voice. It wasn't that she particularly disliked Nabiki as a matter of course, but being at the beck and call of this third wheel was… irritating. Ranma had assigned her the easy duty of keeping the main deck of the ship clear while everyone (except Kuno) went below decks, to pick a real fight. Shampoo would never have said as much, but she felt like she was being sidelined.

Ukyou should have been given this assignment.

But, of course, she wasn't. The spatula freak had always been one of Ranma's favorites, even though she dressed like a man and never cooked anything except slimy _okonomiyaki_. So she had held her own against Konatsu; what did that prove? Only that she'd gotten better, not that she was anywhere in Shampoo's league. The very thought of being the weakest in Juliet Squad… it made her blood boil.

So being pulled aside to run an errand for Nabiki, the selfish sister of that damned _Akane Tendo_ – was it any surprise she felt like beating someone into the ground? The pride of the Amazons was at stake! Still… the mission… if nothing else had been drummed into her over the last couple weeks, it was the mission. The mission came first, no matter what other problems she'd have to deal with back at the base.

Shampoo jumped clear over a cargo crate, and took the opportunity while in midair to get a close look at the area. There was no obvious opening for a hangar. If it was there, it was concealed somehow. She gently landed and walked towards a suspicious number of the giant cargo containers. There were four of them side by side, each half as long as the ship was wide. Most of the rest on the ship's deck were laid out rather randomly, but these four were right in the center of the deck on a large flatbed.

"That's it!" Nabiki chimed in, conforming Shampoo's own conclusions. "Look for a switch or lever or something."

'I am!' Shampoo thought, but instead replied more calmly. "I know."

Unfortunately, there wasn't anything obvious in the way of 'how to get the thing to open' but there were some rails partly concealed by paint. Shampoo was just able to slip a finger into the groove, and bending down low, she could see how the bottom of the flatbed ran along them. Pacing back over to the flatbed itself, she followed along the edge, looking carefully… and there! Reaching down, she unlocked the handle and pulled it out. It didn't get anything moving, but a tentative tug indicated it was probably used in case of electronic failure to manually maneuver the flatbed.

Shampoo sighed; so it was like that, huh?

"Shampoo," Nabiki interrupted. "What are you doing? There's nothing over…"

"I do know what I'm doing, so please just sit back in your chair and watch," Shampoo cut the other girl off, and picked up a heavy steel chain coiled up on the ground nearby. Unclipping it from where it was anchored, she took the whole length over to the heavy flatbed handle, and snapped it in place.

Shampoo measured out about two body lengths (in her case, around ten and a half feet), wrapped the chain around her right arm twice, and started to pull. Adding in her second hand, she continued, despite her right foot slipping on the wet pitted metal of the deck. She huffed from the effort, but when it seemed like she wasn't making any progress, the flatbed started to move, taking with it the two cargo containers lying on top. Another step back… and another… and another, until she seemed to be doing it with little trouble at all, tons of metal moved along the groove set in the floor.

Satisfied after pulling apart the two halves of the flatbed, and exposing what she counted out to be at least twenty feet of clearance, Shampoo shook loose the chain around her right arm and gave the limb a few shakes to work out the kinks. She'd long ago come to accept the fact that she wasn't as physically strong as Ranma, or the annoying lost pig-boy, but she was still the top of her game when it came to raw brute force. The spatula girl was certainly no match for her in that department.

"Impressive as always," Nabiki commented in her ear. "Now I see why you went through the walls back home instead of wasting your time opening the door."

Shampoo huffed.

"Anyway," the distant Tendo sister continued. "If this is the hangar, then it should lead right into the bowels of the ship…"

Shampoo finally came to the now open area between the cargo containers, and there was an opening in the floor. It looked deep, but there was no lighting to tell for sure. Shampoo reactivated the nightvision mode on her stealth suit HUD. Electronically aided, she could make out a hexagonal shape down below, with markings on it – a landing pad, probably. There were only a few other objects around, too, mostly rectangular crates and some machinery.

"Hold on just a second," Nabiki spoke up, perhaps assuming she was about to jump down. "Something's come up. Don't jump down there unless you think you can jump back up right away."

Shampoo didn't much like it, but she pushed back from the gap and crossed her arms. She would have done so even if Nabiki hadn't said anything; her orders were to secure the deck of the _Procyon_, so while a part of her wanted to jump down into the bowels of the ship and the heart of the fight, she wasn't about to disobey orders to go on some personal unsanctioned adventure.

"You have something else in mind?" she asked.

Nabiki gave another confident chuckle. "Don't I always?"


	51. Winter Triangle III

* * *

"Holy…!"

Ranma and Ukyou scattered as a wall of flame bore down on them just a second after the last security door leading into the forward cargo hold unlocked. Ukyou had reflexively hidden behind the flat shield of her battle spatula, while Ranma had been forced to dive to the side and flatten himself against the wall perpendicular to the opened door. At the bottom of the stairs, a man in a black and white battle dress – covered face to toe in what looked like bomb-disposal gear – brandished what could only have been a god damned flamethrower.

I mean, they had been warned about something like this, but still…!

Another gust of flame shot up the stairs, and worse, splatters of unfriendly looking burning oil (or something like that, Ranma had no idea what, maybe napalm) splashed against the floor and walls. No matter what it was exactly, it certainly wasn't the sort of thing you wanted anywhere near you. The stealth suits they wore were environmentally sealed and offered some protection from extremes of temperature, but he doubted it could come close to standing up to the sort of treatment the man downstairs could dish out.

He smirked.

If he tossed a grenade down there, and the Human Torch there blew up, it was likely that the entire room downstairs would turn into an inferno. Another gout of fire shot out, stronger and more persistent than the last one. It seemed that the flamer was getting a little overeager, and coming up stairs.

Ranma held out his right hand, where a spark of psionic energy ignited his trademark confidence-powered _ki _attack, the _Moko Takabisha_. But this was no normal _ki_ blast. Ranma's grin grew, and he silently imagined the look of envy Ryouga and Mousse and Ryu would have, watching this post-mission. They weren't the only ones practicing and perfecting their moves!

Accumulating the energy in the palm of his hand, he squeezed his fingers together, feeling the pulse of the emotive _ki_. He briefly looked down, and saw the web of psionic energy he was weaving abound the energy ball. A little more… just a little more… Another long blast of flame shot out from down the stairs.

"Here we go…" Ranma chuckled, and pushed off from the wall, drawing back his arm like a pitcher in baseball. Making sure he got the angle just right, but never exposing himself in the line of fire from below, Ranma threw the energy ball **hard** into the wall of the stairwell.

And it bounced.

Ricocheting like a glowing blue pinball, it bounced off the wall, leaving a scorching indentation behind. In a quarter second, it shot from one part of the wall to the next, blowing craters in steps and even in the ceiling, leaving a glowing contrail in its wake, like an erratic web. The sound of it shooting off the metal at such a rate was like a rapport of a machinegun, interrupted in the end only by a loud grunt and gurgle, and then the sound of something heavy and metallic hitting the stairs and falling back down to the bottom.

"Amazing, Ranma! I mean Lieutenant!" Ukyou cheered, standing up and heading for the stairwell to see what his new technique had done to the guy with the hand held napalm supersoaker.

Ranma's chest puffed out, but he didn't let the praise show.

"Heh. It was, wasn't it?"

Ok, maybe a little.

Still, he made sure to head down before Ukyou did. If the chance came, he intended to prove that he'd improved not only his offense, but his defense as well. Ryouga's _ki_ attacks had often been able to overwhelm his own, simply by virtue of the lost boy pouring out more depressive _ki_ than a Goth band convention. Leave it to Ryouga to find a technique that actually turned his depression and brooding into a weapon! For a while now, he'd tried to match Ryouga, quantity of _ki_ for quantity of _ki_.

That was a mistake.

It was pointless to try and amp up his confidence to match Ryouga's suicidal-ness. The answer was just like the one he had realized when fighting Saffron: to pierce the larger attack with a more concentrated one of your own. So he'd worked to "solidify" his _Moko Takabisha _into something that wouldn't disperse or radiate with distance. The psionic training he'd undergone had been the key.

On the ground at the bottom of the stairs, the heavily armored man wearing the full body nomex battle dress squirmed, a glowing glob of mental energy rammed into his chest. Ranma shook his head sadly. The "shell" if this new and improved _Moko Takabisha_ could also be made to react only with another _ki_ aura. In other words, it would bounce off a metal wall, but stick to a person, even if that person was wearing metal armor at the time.

The man on the ground (Ranma couldn't see his face, since it was covered by a visor) seemed to see him, and he started to lift a weapon Ranma could only assume was his flamethrower. It did have a cord that attached to something mounted on the man's back. Ranma could sense that, behind him, Ukyou was tensing to make her own attack before the prone figure could strike. Ranma sighed again, and mentally relaxed his control over the _Moko Takabisha_.

The glowing remains on the man's chest exploded, tearing apart his Level III body armor, and doing nothing less pleasant to the flesh beneath. To make matters worse, the force of the explosion ruptured the tank on his back, and the pressurized contents within sprayed out, tossing the man's body to the side and smack into a wall. Even before the last of whatever was in the fuel tank released into the air, the weapon's user was no longer moving or breathing.

Ranma frowned; it was an ugly way to inaugurate the first battlefield use of a new technique. But it couldn't be avoided. He motioned to Ukyou, and pointed to one of the doors off to the side. The room they were in, he could see right away, was different than he had expected. They were in largely uncharted waters in regards to layout, and moreover, the make of this area of the ship was noticeably different than the rest.

It looked newer and cleaner, for one thing.

They were in the fourth cargo bay, as far as he could tell, and it had obviously been refitted to contain new structures instead of bulk cargo. Ukyou had just checked the door, and turned back to him when the one he had been watching opened, just a crack, and like slow motion, a grenade rolled leisurely out into the room.

There wasn't even time to shout a warning.

The concussion grenade exploded with a deafening roar, and on its proverbial heels, a trio of men charged through the doorway, weapons leveled and taking practiced offensive positions. They were a professional looking group, with Level II body armor, helmets, and little apparent fear of the men and women who had cut through the mercenaries above decks. What they saw, entering the room, was a giant spatula leaning against the wall, and the bleeding body of one of their comrades, his hand still loosely holding onto his flamethrower.

"Where are they?" one of the men growled, his Russian making his background (and those of his comrades in arms) patently obvious.

The limp body of the flamethrower operator on the ground twitched.

"Gennadiy!" One of the newcomers yelled, heading towards the fallen man. "Are you…?"

The formerly lifeless body suddenly leapt up, standing uneasily on two legs.

"Haven't you ever seen a Body Manipulation technique before?" The dead man seemed to ask, but in the wrong language, and definitely the wrong voice. The three Russians exchanged confused looks.

"I guess not," the voice said, and suddenly the body lurched forward and fell to the ground. Hiding behind it, going amazingly without notice, a figure in a dark full body battle suit dropped to the ground. He flickered, and the closest of the armed men catapulted into the air, his face caved in by a kick that could derail a train car.

Impressively, the remaining two men kept their wits, leveling their weapons and firing even as they took aim at the new target. Twin Baikal MP-131K pump action shotguns fired, filling the air with a identical cones of 12 gauge buckshot. Their target, however, was no ordinary human. Between the instant when they started to depress the trigger, and the moment when the gun fired the slug, Ranma was no longer where he had been a heartbeat ago.

Standing perpendicular to the men, and with his back to both their cones of fire, Ranma inclined his head, and watched as the heavy, blunt end of Ukyou's battle spatula flew past him. Behind him, he noticed the men already moving to fire again, guessing that he had moved to the right even before their vision had fully informed them of that fact. They were pretty good, these two.

By the way Ukyou had attacked, even before she hit her target, Ranma knew which one of the men she was engaging. He watched with a smile as she made a swift motion with her arm that sent a ripple, like a wave, down the metal cord towards the blunt weight attached to the end of her weapon. By his estimate, he could assume that it would hit the man on the right's weapon, and then curve down and entangle his hands at the wrist. If the weight had just passed him, that meant it would hit in about a hundredth of a second. The man's arms would be immobilized after about one point two seconds.

This analysis occurred in that split fraction of a second, without Ranma even truly realizing it. It was not really 'thought at slow motion,' as it was subconscious comprehension bordering on precognition. It was, really, the only way to be able to fight as he did at such high speeds. Ranma stepped back in front of the two men, and before they could fire again, he seized the one on the left by the inside of his wrist. He was relying on Ukyou to take care of the other man, but there wasn't a single flashing neuron of doubt that she would fail to do so.

Up and over the man's arm went, until his shotgun was a threat only to the ceiling, and then not even that. It was the weakness of weapons like rifles and shotguns. They were shaped a certain way, and they were basically solid. Human limbs, however, followed the natural motions and compliances of the skeletal and muscular system. They were not solid. A man holding a weapon properly had his arm a certain way, and though his joints and skeletal system, his body could be manipulated, and the threat of his weapon (which could, after all, only fire in one direction) virtually neutralized.

It was just a matter of speed.

In just over a second, Ranma had the man's shotgun behind his head. His MP-131 fired, spraying the wall with shot that bounced back and tore apart his left arm around the elbow. Ranma effortlessly followed through by flipping the man over and introducing his face to the ground. A swift, clean strike to the back of his neck put an end to the man. It was much more humane and dignified than an axe kick to the back of the skull, which was his first impulse. There was no need to splatter brains all over the place, after all.

Ranma sighed again.

Truly, this wasn't particularly rewarding work.

A gargled gasp prompted him to look over his shoulder, where Ukyou seemed to be staring down at the man she'd just killed. By his position on the ground alone, Ranma could extrapolate how she had done the deed. First, she had pulled him in after ensnaring his hands and knocking his shotgun aside. Then she had hooked the long end of her weapon up and behind the back of his head, since her pulling stance wasn't well suited at this range for using the other end of her weapon. Then she had leaned inwards, towards him, and used the momentum of her swing to bring his head down while kneeing up. His neck had broken, probably around the third or fourth cervical vertebrae. That accounted for both the position of the body, and why it was face up.

Ranma realized, then, that this was the first person Ukyou had killed on this mission. She hadn't encountered any opposition back above decks, when they had first inserted. A sad expression crossed his features, but only briefly. She wasn't the only one to lose her innocence tonight.

"Ukyou," he said, putting authority into his tone.

"Yes, sir?" She seemed to snap out of it, and faced him.

"Let's keep moving. We don't want Konatsu to think we're slacking off," he tried to say it in a confident, leadership-inspiring sort of way, like he had practiced. IT was actually hard to tell if it worked. His squad wasn't exactly normal, and he was far from accomplished in reading people… especially girls.

Ukyou nodded, her face hidden from him.

They quickly cleared the floor, and headed down to the next level.

* * *

Despite a personal aversion to killing, Konatsu was, sadly, quite good at it.

'As soon as I get back to base, I'm going to take the longest bubble bath ever…' he mused, retracting the bloody garrote wire back into its hidden compartment under his wrist. At his feet, a trio of bodies laid splayed out, one with its throat sliced open, another with a bloody hole where an eye had been, and the last with a knife sticking out of the side of his throat at a thirty degree angle. All three wore body armor far heaver than the Thai mercenaries, and to Konatsu's shock, one even wore a flame thrower on his back.

The others all used some sort of shotgun. Intel had led them to believe, pre-mission, that the common weapon could be some sort of assault rifle or sub machine gun. The spray from a shotgun was difficult to avoid in such confined spaces, so he could see why these men used it, but he couldn't help feeling they were uniformly used here for some other reason that just that. Regardless, their weaponry alone meant they had to be taken seriously and taken out quickly.

Konatsu glanced up at the ventilation shaft he had crawled through, glad to be out of it any into an area with enough room to move more than just his shoulders. It had been a difficult little trek, even with his lithe frame (the genuine girls on the team would have probably found it too tight a fit), and his use of the _Jatai _(or Serpent Body) technique. The security here was quite good, but rather improvised.

"Saotome-taichou, I have control of what seems to be the security checkpoint leading into the lab area," Konatsu said, approaching one of the panels to the left of the large clear plastic windows that allowed the room to look out over the checkpoint itself. He could see two heavy locked doors, and above them, the label "Lab A." The controls seemed simple enough, with a numerical pad for entering a code, and a slot that looked like it required a physical key.

"We'll be there in a minute," Ranma replied, after a second's pause.

Konatsu frowned. A numerical code and a key… both could be problems, since he couldn't see any computer port or the like to attach a hacking device. He quickly decided to start searching the bodies while he called in for help from C&C.

"Command, do you have a security passcode for the Lab area?" he asked, rifling through one of the dead men's pockets for anything of value. "It would be numerical only. 'Lab A.'"

"We believe we have that, yes," Command replied, letting Konatsu wait for only ten or twelve seconds. "Try 47521."

Konatsu nodded imperceptibly, and was just about to get up and try it when his right hand found something interesting crumpled up in the vest pocket of one of the Russian mercs. Unfolding it, he saw that it was a "Farside" comic, taken from a calendar. There were a number of men in what he assumed was Hell, judging by the fire and the devils, with one of the men whispering something to the other. Below the printed text of what the man had said, also in Cyrillic, were two sets of numbers, with the top one crossed out (the bottom one being 47521). On the other side of the paper were three lines of text, with a long set of numbers under each one.

"Command," he asked. "Translation, please?"

"One moment," Command replied, as they patched him into contact with a translator. Konatsu smiled slightly – they weren't any shortage of people back in Seiran who could translate Russian. If it had been something really exotic, though, they'd probably have had to check with other bases or even make use of one of their civilian contacts to do a rush job.

"Translation is as follows," Command answered with due haste. "Top line: 'Red Fox,' middle line: 'White Rabbit,' bottom line: 'Brown Bear.' The cartoon text is 'I hate this place.'"

"Not very helpful, but thanks," Konatsu rooted around in the man's pockets for another few seconds, and found a keychain that he simply tore free. Three of the keys were gold, and one silver. Taking a guess, the legendary male _kunoichi _tried that one first. It wouldn't turn initially, so he put in the numeric code first. A green light lit up over the panel.

"I have access to…" he started to say, when the door to the checkpoint busted open. Ranma and Ukyou entered at the ready, alert for another ambush. Konatsu waved at them from behind the heavy plastic guard window.

"Good work, Konatsu," Ranma said, and nodded in his position, as he and Ukyou slowly walked towards the lab doors. "Gold team is in position."

"We were getting tired of waiting," Ryouga replied from where he and Ryu stood; ready to breach the lab area from the other end of the ship.

"Alright!" Ranma gave Konatsu another quick nod. "Red Four. Gold Four. Green Three."

Konatsu turned the key, and the security doors slid open. While Ranma lead Ukyou across a walkway and into "Lab A," he unlocked the checkpoint door and took up his position, guarding the entry/exit point. If the worst were to happen (like whatever chemical weapons were stored in the labs ended up being released), he was to re-seal the lab doors, and coordinate the rest of the mission.

In his hand, he still held the Farside comic.

"These numbers…" he wondered aloud. "Could they be…?"

-----

Ukyou moved through the decontamination room, ignoring the spray she and Ranma were receiving. A few seconds after the doors behind them had closed, and their impromptu shower came to an end, the ones in front of them yawned open. The area beyond was clean, sterile, white walled and lit by softly glowing overhead lights. They continued carefully, unsure of what was ahead, or even what the layout was.

A bulletin board on the wall reminded them to "sign in" whenever they entered or left the Lab. There were the same names on that pad of paper, over and over, but the handwriting was so terrible that she couldn't even begin to try and read what they actually were. A few other notes, both printed out and hand written were pinned to the board as well. One picture, a snapshot of an ominous looking UFO hovering in the night sky, sent chills down her spine.

"Careful," Ranma reminded her over their comm. "I've got a bad feeling about this place."

Heading a short way down the hall, to where it curved and headed left, they finally encountered two doors. They were both labeled, the first being "xenobiology" and the second being "Observation." Opening a small panel in the wall, and exposing two buttons, Ranma pressed the one near the "Observation" door. It opened with a hiss that reminded her of the doors back in parts of Seiran Mountain. Ranma then motioned for her to not follow him, but instead to check out the other door.

Opening the door to the lab, she quickly ducked in, checking for anyone hiding behind desks or equipment. Lights came on as soon as the door opened, but she didn't see anyone around. It looked like any other Lab she had ever seen, except for a large glass stand set into one of the walls. Here, there were cautionary labels in both English and Russian, along with bright yellow and black warning stripes.

"Unfertilized Roe?" she read the words aloud. "Fertilized Roe. Microspawn culture?"

"Ukyou! Do not touch anything in there!" Ranma sounded… a little frantic. Shrugging at the strange things behind the glass, she headed towards her squad leader in the Observation Room.

"We've found something," Ryu interrupted then, speaking for Red team. "It looks like there was a living quarters for scientists in the rear of the ship."

"This seems to be some kind of engineering section," Ryouga added, sounding a little confused. "Mousse, when you're done setting up the explosives, head over here."

"Will do!" Mousse replied. "I'll be done in a few minutes."

'So the fight's over? But where's Aliyev?' Ukyou wondered, finding Ranma. He was looking at one of the walls – no, not a wall, part of it was transparent. Catching sight of just what the "Observation" was built to observe, she turned a shade of white. There were people being held in cells, heavy mostly transparent cells ringed with steel braces, like a cage. There were six of them still alive: three men and three women. Two other cells had dead bodies that looked like they'd been torn open from the inside.

Ukyou took a step closer to the glass. There was something… wrong with the six people. They were alive, moving around and all that, but their skin looked rough and yellow. Like they had a liver disease or something. Their faces were bloated and misshapen, too.

'Had they been beaten?' she wondered, watching them. Suddenly, one of the men started throwing himself against the glass of his cage. A nearby terminal showed a spike in one of its recordings. When he stopped hitting the cell, it leveled off and returned to zero.

"What's wrong with them?" Ukyou asked, hoping her commander would have some sort of answer.

"They're dead, Ukyou. Let's keep moving." There was a small lift at the end of the hall, but they took the stairs down, leading from the Observation room to an open area on the floor below. There was another Lab with no one in it, but the floor seemed to mostly be used for storage. A large door designated as leading to the "Hangar" was all that remained.

* * *

Doctor Iosif Aliyev looked down the line of despondent and defeatist researchers. They were competent men and women, this was true, but their spirits were more easily broken than he had assumed. They were huddled together in an ancillary "security box" built into the side of the Hangar, trying to wait out the firefight that had engulfed the rest of the ship.

"What are we going to do?" One of them, a man named Gregori, all but wailed. "They are going to kill us! What are we going to do?"

"You have a gun, Gregori," Iosif answered him. "Why not just shoot yourself and be done with it?"

"That is not funny, Iosif!" The only woman in the group, Uliana, scolded him and tried to reassure the jittery and frightened mouse of a man beside her. "We should surrender! Cooperate! Maybe they will be lenient!"

"After what we have done? After what we have made?" The fourth member of their group, Nikolay, stared at the rest of them with fire in his eyes. "We should just die, smiling, knowing that we will have done our part to fight these fascist pigs!"

"The Visitors will not forget our sacrifice!" The most impressionable of the seven of them, Kirill, looked up from where he sat, eyes hopeful. "They will clone us! They… they must have our memories stored, somewhere, right? They'll clone us! So it doesn't matter if we die! Right, Iosif?"

"Exactly, Kirill. There is nothing to be afraid of. Nothing!" Iosif patted Gregori on the shoulder, trying to at least appear conciliatory and supportive. "Besides, have you forgotten, Gregori? We have one last card to play. If we are lucky, it may just be enough."

The meeker scientist frowned, searching his memory. "One last card…? What do you mean?"

Iosif just smiled. "Watch. You will see." His grin widened, pushing back his beard into his cheeks. "It was a gift, from the Visitors, for all our hard work on their behalf…"

* * *

Ryu lead his squad commander as they ran across the umbilical connecting the engineering section to the Hangar. He wasn't nearly as technically inclined as someone like Mousse, who relied on tricks and traps as part of his Art, but a lot of the stuff he had seen looked like parts for a missile or rocket. There were also canisters of different shapes and sizes set up for testing, rather than storing, and he couldn't help but speculate as to what they would be used for. Intel had said a "chemical weapon" after all…

Each cargo compartment, it seemed was almost entirely separate from those adjacent to it. From what they had discovered, the only connections between them were the isolated tubes or umbilicals that stretched from one section inside the ship to the next. Reaching the door to the Hangar, he paused, but then caught himself. Ranma and Ukyou would be breaking the doors on the other side at the same time; he couldn't afford to hesitate!

Stepping into the Hangar, he saw bright lights set up inside the enclosed space. High above, a rectangular line cut into the ceiling, revealing the starry sky. The Hangar was not large by XCOM standards, but it did fill the hold of the cargo ship quite nicely. A slightly elevated platform looked like a helicopter landing pad, and there were a few pipes and crates scattered about. His HUD automatically polarized, filtering the strong light sources nearby.

"Greetings!" a voice announced, not on the comm., but from a speaker somewhere in the Hangar. "I'll congratulate you on your skill in taking this ship, but I'm afraid that there is one last obstacle left."

"What the Hell…?" Ryu growled, searching for the source of the taunting voice. It had to be Aliyev. But where was he? The sound of machinery moving, however, tipped him off to another potential problem. Turning his head towards the source of the noise, he saw two doors retracting, revealing an alcove built into the wall. There was something inside it, something large, like a HWP...

Then he felt the ground shake, perceptibly.

"Is that…?" he heard Ukyou gasp, from where she and Ranma stood on the opposite end of the Hangar. Ryu took a step back. He knew exactly what it was. A tree-trunk sized, three toed mechanical foot stepped out from the darkness of the alcove, sending a ripple of vibration through the ground as it hit the ground. A gleam of red-hued metal came into view, and flanking it, paired metallic arrays concealing deadly firepower.

"**SECTOPOD!!**"


	52. The Meaning of Fear I

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. The UNETCO timetable moves ever forward, but a new complication has arisen as the alien forces in the Far East surge out in unexpected numbers and with surprising fury. India and Juliet Squads have been tasked with taking the _Procyon_, a cargo ship operated by the alien enthralled Sirius Group. Facing the unexpected power of an alien Sectopod terror unit, the two squads are soon to be confronted by the true nature of the weapon designed by the sadistic Doctor Aliyev.

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia**  
Chapter XVIII  
_The Meaning of Fear_

* * *

A sharp pain, like a pinch, shot up Akane's leg from where she had been hit, and she nearly stumbled and fell into the bush directly ahead of her. Breathing heavily from fatigue and excitement, she pushed through the bushes, trying to find cover from the invisible laser that had just tagged her. She scrambled, on two legs and one arm, keeping her rifle close by her side and off the ground. She could just see her target through the trees: a dark silver shape. But she had to watch out, too. It was just the small moving enemies she had to be on the lookout for. 

There!

Steadying her shoulder against the sturdy surface of an old tree, she took aim and fired up at the round saucer shape in the air. First, a snap shot to check her aim, and then a trio of blasts up at the hovering platform. Finally, a red light flashed above and below it, signaling a hit. That was two out of the three disks on the course, but she hadn't scored a single hit on any of the mobile targets yet.

Heading back, she zig zagged around trees, keeping her profile low. Unlike when she'd practiced with Ryu, she didn't have any of the normal functional equipment this time: just her existing training, reflexes, and endurance. Aside from her helmet and visor (which she was forbidden to remove, even though it was non-functional), a little over a hundred pounds of dead weight on her back and midsection helped to wear her down. The thick forest area was actually something of a relief compared to what inevitably came next.

Ahead of her lay a boulder strewn field with high grass.

There was next to no cover to hide behind, and the terrain was about as rough as it could possibly get. Worse still: she had to go uphill. There was little time to pause and catch her breath, though; the last target was somewhere across the field, and she couldn't see it yet. Her only hope was that she could sprint across before any of her opponents took up good sniping positions, or figured out exactly where she was. At least there wasn't any barbed wire around to get in her way.

Moving around the edge of where the forest and the rubble strewn field met, she picked out a good path that partly made use of a rise in the hill for cover. Steeling herself for the attempt, she broke out into the open in a run, making her way around the larger rocks and counting on her balance and honed instincts to compensate for any unseen obstacles underfoot. There was nothing to warn her if she was being shot at already as she made her run; the lasers they were using had tracers, but they weren't easy to spot, especially when you didn't know where to look.

Her torso body armor suddenly shook, and a small shock made sure she noticed she'd been hit. She cursed; a torso shot was considered a kill. She was dead. Again. Still, she kept going, taking cover behind an exceptionally large boulder, looking for where the rest of her team had placed the third and final saucer. It could be almost anywhere: suspended between the trees, on the ground hiding in the bushes, or sometimes just out in the open, daring her to peek out from under cover and shoot it.

From her current position, she could tell that part of the landscape ahead was concealed by particularly tall dry grass. It was a good bet that it was there. Ducking behind a small copse of trees that stood out slightly from the next major tree line, Akane crept towards a spot overlooking that location. She saw the slivery shell almost immediately, and wasting no time, she picked it off after two successive semi-automatic bursts. The red light on top lit up, indicating it was "dead" and Akane breathed a sigh of relief.

Course complete!

And she'd only lost her life, her left leg, and her right arm twice. It was certainly an improvement from the first time she'd given the course a try. Walking slowly out of the cover of the trees, she looked up at the nearly cloudless sky and silently wished it would snow. Of course, a layer of frost on the ground would have made her easier to track, but she certainly wouldn't have minded being able to smear a bit of chilly wet snow on her face at the moment.

Gradually, the others melted out of the wilderness, wearing gear identical to her own, even down to the weights on their backs. The first had a slightly more female build, identifying her even from a distance as the other woman in Golf Squad: Janis Lohse, from one of the Baltic States. A short distance behind Janis, Akane saw a larger figure she guessed to be their leader, Sergeant Karl Winther. He was from Austria, and a veteran of UNETCO who had been with the organization since 2001. The last member of their squad dipped out of the shadows from a different direction.

Akane frowned at him – he had been the one to pick her off then, just a minute ago. His name was Ashgar Khan, an Indian, and a superb marksman. Not a large man, she could see that the weights simulating their gear were giving him more trouble than either Janis or Sergeant Winther. Still, he had kept up well enough to find a good spot to shoot at her from. Akane considered that; next time she would have to try and shoot him, first, or try and wear him out by leading the group on a chase.

They met up in the middle of the rocky field, exchanging their personal experience during the exercise. Winther and Khan were both soft spoken men, very much the opposite of the sorts of guys Akane was used to. Khan in particular took a very analytic approach to his performance, and his strategies. Janis, on the other hand, was more aggressive and outspoken. During her runs through the exercise, she had always tried to pick off the rest of the team (whose job it was to get in her way and "kill" her), saving the target saucers for later.

"Just because they won't fire at you, doesn't mean you should take them lightly," Winther reminded her, and through her, Akane. "In the field, you'll find Cyberdisks more than formidable."

"During terror missions involving Sectoids, I believe up to twenty five percent of fatalities are due to Cyberdisks," Khan agreed. "This is disproportionate to their actual deployment numbers."

"Well, it doesn't help that we're restricted in what firepower we can use during terror missions," Janis argued, taking the point of view that in a modern battlefield, the bigger the target, the sooner it got killed.

"I've seen films," Akane said, feeling more confident than she had initially been about contributing to a conversation between admittedly much more experienced XCOM soldier recruits. She was one of them now, didn't that show that UNETCO had confidence in her ability to fight and improve?

"But I was wondering… why is it that most Cyberdisks tend to stand still so often?" she asked. "We know they can fire on the move…"

Janis and Khan quickly turned to Winther, who considered the question for a second before answering, "That is most likely a limitation of the Sectoid controlling the disk, rather than the weapon itself. Just because your target seems robotic, or non-organic, you should not fall into the trap of thinking you can predict what it will do. Think of them as simply heavily armed and armored aliens."

"When you think of them like that," he concluded. "Their weakness becomes clear. After all: what is the first thing you do when you spot one in the field?"

* * *

"Command! We have a problem here!" 

"A really big fucking problem!"

The sound of the plasma beam hitting tempered steel was like static from a hundred television sets, and what metal it struck peeled away as if it were paper from a flame. It created an expanding molten hole large enough to walk through and passing through three bulkheads. One could look through the damage done, from the inside of the ship, and see the South China Sea.

The Sectopod took another step forward, port plasma cannon growing red hot in preparation to fire. Ukyou stood, stunned. Next to her, Ranma had just barely moved in time. The Beam had passed right past them, right next to her; the heat from it could be felt even through her insulated stealth suit. Stunned as she was, if she had been the target instead of Ranma…

"Ukyou!" Ranma's voice snapped her out of it. "_MOVE_."

Instinct kicked in. Instinct honed by years of fighting and training. Instinct honed in battles against the relentless sea. Powerful leg muscles flexed, slamming her heels against the ground, and sending her forward in a blur of sudden acceleration.

'Attack!' her mind screamed, 'Defense is suicide! Attack! **ATTACK**!'

A solid line of strawberry red, flashing gold at the front and growing darker near the tail, passed over her shoulder. So close! So terribly close! Even without thinking as to whether they would be effective or not, she skipped right past her normal repertoire of techniques and un-strapped her UNETCO modified MSG-90b carbine. Even as she took aim, like slow motion, she saw the massive alien robot shifting its body and onboard weapons to reacquire her. The starboard plasma cannon was starting to glow.

She aimed for it, pumped the under slung grenade launcher on her carbine, and fired. The explosive self-propelled cartridge rocketed out of the underside of her weapon like a bat out of Hell, crossing the room even as Ukyou's shoulder hit the ground and she started rolling towards cover. Her aim was dead on – the small self propelled grenade hit the exposed iris of the plasma cannon just before it could fire, engulfing it in fire and a concussive explosion powerful enough to shred an unarmored human body.

A millisecond later, a lance of plasma extended from the cloud of smoke, the force of the rapidly heated and expanding air blowing away the kicked up cover in a single pulse, like ripple of water radiating from a thrown stone. The excited particles cleaved a pillar holding up the helipad in two, and cored a boiler like barrel. Superheated steam tore the metal fixture apart.

The Sectopod took another step forward, totally unharmed.

A blast of blue telekinetic _ki_ slammed into its body as it emerged from the smoke, followed by a thunderous spark of green and black that impacted and rippled harmlessly against the nearly indestructible alien alloy that made up the Sectopod's hull. Ukyou, having disappeared from sight and presenting little apparent threat, seemed to lose the terror unit's interest as it turned to face the three men in the room. Ukyou rolled onto her feet and jumped, heading for the wall.

Her carbine had four small grenades in stacked cartridges loaded inside the tube of its grenade launcher. She intended to use every single one. There was always the chance of a golden BB, or of crippling it against the odds. It wasn't like anyone else present could do better. Taking two steps against the horizontal surface and pushing off, hard, she fired again and again, the first two shots harmlessly impacting the top of its armored shell, and the third hitting the ground at its feet. Despite the blast and shrapnel, the Sectopod didn't even look scratched.

Ranma, Ryu and Ryouga were running interference on the other side of the hangar, moving at a speed Ukyou felt envious of. It was almost unfair how the boys in their teams were stronger than the girls. Her occasional manly dressing aside, Ukyou did have a feminist side. Her pride wanted her to participate, but the rational side of her brain couldn't quite imagine how.

"Ranma!" she called, while landing and skidding along the metal floor for several feet. "What do we do?"

Another killing beam from the Sectopod's plasma cannon blew yet another hole in the hull of the cargo ship. Only the crisscrossing and dizzying agility of the three male martial artists kept them from being skewered.

"Fall back!" Ranma's response came between leaps that would make an Olympic level gymnast's eyes grow wide with amazement. "When Mousse gets here, do exactly what he tells you!"

"Mousse?" She ducked behind a large metal crate and remembered – in this first few frantic moments, Ryouga had called for Mousse, and the Chinese fighter had promised to 'be right there.' That meant he was coming in from the other side of the hangar. Behind her, she could see a plasma stream punch a hole in the ceiling. Taking a deep breath, and getting ready, she waited for the sound of the next shot, and ran.

Leaping out from behind cover, she saw Ryu toss Ryouga up into the air. The lost boy actually hit the ceiling, bounced off, and shot downward, using gravity and his own powerful legs to propel him down towards his target. As expected, the Sectopod identified this mad gambit, and started to aim up. It was in that instant's distraction that Ranma, the true threat, struck.

"Shichuu Rakuchi Sei!" he cried, appearing behind the Sectopod from out of no where using the _Umisenken_, and aiming for the terror unit's legs. The 'Brace Falling Down Strength' was normally used on humans, but as part of the 'way of the silent thief' she couldn't help but watch and wonder if it would work on this alien robot as well. The technique itself was designed to take out a target's legs and as a 'soft art,' it could theoretically work without needing to penetrate layers of alien alloy armor.

Ranma's arms spread out, trying to upend the robot's legs, and when that failed, he rolled into a ball and kicked out in a split, improvising a version of the technique on the fly to hit the joints. Neither worked. Ryouga, meanwhile, turned in midair and slammed, feet first, into the 'face' of the Sectopod with sufficient force to crater the ground at the robot's feet. It seemed to ignore the attack, and just fired, narrowly missing the leader of India Squad as he spun out of the way.

"Damnit!" he cursed, flipping off the ground with one hand.

"That should have worked!" Ranma snarled angrily, his voice betraying his growing apprehension with the situation. Alien alloys were actually extremely light; there was no way they were simply weak enough to lift or move it. Which meant: "It's anchored itself in place somehow!"

"In that case, let's bury it!" Ryu replied, and Ukyou ran past him as he started to make the motions for his trademark _Yamasenken Kijin Raishu Dan_. Ukyou gasped, slammed her foot down into the ground, denting the metal, and suddenly reversed her momentum. Diving into the Kumon heir, she cradled him under her and hastily adjusted the angle of her alien alloy battle spatula.

A glancing blow from the Sectopod's particle beam, no more than the trailing end of it, hit the flat of her _Hera-sama_. The imparted force threw both her and Ryu to the side, crashing into a trio of wooden crates. The damn machine was fast – faster than any of XCOM's heavy weapons platforms. Using its legs and main body, it could adjust its aim deceptively quickly.

"My god…" she rolled off Ryu, breathing heavy. Looking over her shoulder, she could see that her battle spatula, her Hera-sama, the weapon that she had been told was effectively indestructible, had a ragged scar down the flat of it marring the normally perfect surface. Bits of it had been physically sheared off by the beam.

"Thanks," Ryu offered, flipping back onto his feet. Another blast of gold and red passed overhead, blowing a poster sized hole in the ships' hull.

"One more time!" he set his stance, this time from behind cover. Ukyou nodded, and held up the other end of her battle spatula, giving him a reflective surface to aim from. She had trained with India Squad more than anyone else in Juliet; so she knew how they thought, fought, planned, and executed their techniques.

From behind the relative safety of cover, in this case most of the helipad, Ryu could see his targets reflected in the mirror-like flat of her weapon, and hit them with his _Kijin Raishu Tekidan_. Ryu concentrated, taking in the necessary angles, and started to move his arms in sudden sharp motions. Vacuum blades shot past Ukyou at high speed, but she never flinched, trusting in Ryu's mastery of the technique. The blades the arched sharply behind her, and flew up at the ceiling. Repeated strikes cut lines in the metal above their heads until a massive panel came loose, crashing to the ground.

And landing directly on top of the Sectopod.

Ranma and Ryouga, still dividing the terror weapon's attention, howled in approval, taking the opportunity to finally catch a breather. The constant high speed motion wasn't so much of a problem for the two endurance freaks, but tossing out special techniques as distractions was immensely draining, even for men like them. Ukyou and Ryu also peeked out from behind the helipad, looking out to where the Sectopod had been flattened beneath several tones of steel.

"It isn't enough," Ranma said, observing the rubble strewn quarter of the hangar from his perch on top of a metal pipe jutting out of the floor. "Ryouga!"

"I know!" The lost one jumped towards the now moving tangle of fallen steel. He took a few steps around it, looking for the right spot, before slamming his palms into the floor. For a split second, nothing happened.

Then Ukyou felt it, a pulse of ki running through the ground at her feet.

"Bakusai Tenketsu!"

A gaping maw large enough to swallow a tank erupted beneath the rubble as metal curled and deformed and split into giant shards. The Sectopod had nearly extradited itself when it, and the tons of steel that had plowed into it from above, fell into the hole and down deep into the hull.. A beam of burning particles shot out in vain as it began to fall, firing up and into the sky. Deep in the outermost section of the cargo ship's massive hull, the alien device's fall came to a crashing halt.

"Mousse!" Ryouga barked, standing up and backing away from the hole. "Anytime now…!"

"Almost there!" Mousse replied from over the comm..

"Well," Ranma ventured. "At least…"

The sound of something going "Thunk! Thunk!" into the ceiling cut the pigtailed martial artist off. Ukyou looked up, trying to find the source of the sound, as did everyone else. It was hard to see at first, but then she saw a hint of light playing off something… like a wire?

Turning from the ceiling to the hole in the floor, Ukyou saw the top of the Sectopod start to rise from below. It was slightly awkward, however, as if it was rising ass first. She looked closer, curiosity overcoming caution, and took note of the four unusual protrusions – like spines – that stuck out of the "back" rear of the robot. Whatever it was was coming out of the back two, and she could see the front pair begin to swivel and face forward.

Thunk!

Thunk!

"Wires!" Ukyou could guess. "It's using wires!"

Immediately, Ryouga and Ryu let fly a bandanna and a vacuum blade, trying to cut where they guessed the first two wires to be, suspending the Sectopod from the ceiling. Ryu's vacuum blade seemed to hit nothing before plowing into the wall, leaving a crescent scar. Ryouga's bandanna, however, hit something… and itself became sliced in two.

'What the hell could cut…?' but she knew the answer. She used alien alloy wire herself. This had to be some razor version. It made sense, too: alien devices had to be able to operate in low or non-existent gravity. It would have something to anchor its feet in place, and move itself around in a weightless environment.

Facts were facts. They couldn't damage it. Physical attacks were useless and even _ki_ attacks seemed completely ineffective. They couldn't pick it up and throw it if it rooted itself in place, and they couldn't drop it into the sea, not while it had something to attach to. A Sectopod was armored like a main battle tank; only heavy weaponry had a chance against it. Just what the hell were they supposed to do?!

"I have a plan," Ranma spoke up, as the crest of the Sectopod raised up and over the hole in the ground, allowing it a clear aim at everyone in the hangar.


	53. The Meaning of Fear II

"They're still alive!" Gregori's face screwed up into an expression of panicked worry. "And… and that robot is punching holes in the hull! This is terrible!"

"Please, Doctor Aliyev," he pleaded, looking behind him at the other _Procyon_ scientists. "We have to get out of here! It isn't _safe_!"

"There is always the emergency escape," Kirill ventured, wavering between his normally slavish support of whatever Aliyev told him to believe and his own instinct for self preservation. "Maybe we could… could take it… and, and… get away on a life raft or something!"

"Do you know how far we are from land out here?" Iosef Aliyev spoke up, admonishing his subordinate. "They're probably watching for just that kind of stupid mistake. We'd never get away."

Nikolay, typically, agreed with his boss. "We're better off waiting here for the robot to kill them. The ship can survive a few holes in it."

"Its safer being in a lifeboat waiting to be picked up than standing around here, Iosef," Uliana argued. "You can stay here if you want, but let Gregori and me go."

"Impossible!" Iosef declared, crossing his arms. "If any of the enemy on the deck of the ship were around, they would discover the emergency escape hatch."

"Damnit…" Gregori grumbled, looking out the window overlooking the hangar. The Sectopod was hanging in the air, now, and getting ready to set its feet back down on the ground. It was still firing at one of the speedy targets in the room, and the helipad was beginning to resemble swiss cheese since it generally had the misfortune of being used as cover by the invading XCOM troops (when they weren't ducking back into the halls leading to the two labs). What would happen if a stray shot hit the control alcove? Everyone inside would be obliterated!

"Damnit!" he cursed again, and his eyes turned discretely downward to the SPS - _Samozaryadnyj Pistolet Serdjukova_ – tucked into his pants. Unlike Iosef, he'd never fired a gun before, but they all had one, especially given the sorts of experiments they had been performing lately. Chryssalid venom had a runaway effect on the metabolism of the creatures it infected, boosting strength, speed and aggression considerably. A few rounds from a pistol to the skull would still put an infected human down for the count, though, so it was better than nothing (though less of a deterrent than a good old flamethrower).

"Damnit!" he cursed yet again, and made a snap decision, reaching for the pistol. He had to get to the deck; find a life boat, and get off the ship. He had to at least try. At this rate, even if the alien robot was able to kill those annoyingly super fast XCOM stormtroopers, it would shoot so many holes in the ship that it would probably sink.

No! It was better to take this opportunity, the best opportunity they would have, to get away and life to do whatever another day. After all, he didn't have any particular loyalty to the aliens or the Sirius Group. He just needed some money to pay off his gambling debts and retire.

"None of you move!" he whirled on the other scientists in the room, holding the large grip of the pistol in his hands with what he hoped appeared to be confidence in his ability to aim and fire the weapon. Iosef and the others seemed genuinely amazed by his gambit, and seeing their faces, Gregori started to smile. He's definitely outwitted Iosef with this plan!

"What the HELL are you going, Gregori?!" Iosef quickly looked to Nikolay, who was slowly reaching for his own gun.

"Don't do it, Nikolay!" Gregori adjusted his general aim. "I swear I'll shoot!"

The gruff engineer paused, unsure whether to call his bluff.

"Gregori…" By the sound of Uliana's voice, he could guess that she was as stunned by any of them. He beckoned her to follow him.

"We can make it, Uliana! With all this commotion in the hangar, there's no way there'll be anyone on the top deck. We'll take a boat; get away from here!"

Kirill started to rise from his seat. "Gregori, you…!"

"No. No!" Iosef blurted out. "They want to go? Alright. Alright. Let them go."

Nikolay growled. "But…!"

"No. It is ok, Nikolay," Doctor Aliyev assured him. "Let them go."

"You're a reasonable man, Iosef…" Gregori said, moving towards the emergency exit. He tapped in a four number code with his free hand, and the door opened. Inside was a small tube that led up to the main deck and a hidden hatch, via a sturdy ladder. There was just enough room for one person at a time to ascend, but it was more than enough to take them to safety.

"Good luck, Gregori," Aliyev offered amiably. "I think you'll need it."

"You, too," Gregori replied. "Come on, Uliana. You go first!"

Together, the two started to climb, leaving Iosef, Nikolay and Kirill behind. The door had just closed, when Nikolay turned on Doctor Aliyev.

"I can't believe you let him just walk away!" the irate engineer yelled. "He'll get caught, and…!"

"He won't get caught, Nikolay," Iosef interrupted the man. "Did you not see how our friend Gregori held his pistol? He was like a baby. But there was no point letting him shoot in here and accidentally hit someone or something."

The _Procyon_'s chief scientist slowly reached behind and pulled out his own SPS. Unlike Gregori, he held it with a confidence that came from repeated practice. Checking it, he walked towards the emergency door, counting down from eight. Opening the door with the exact same code used moments ago he casually ducked into the escape tube and fired upwards. The sound of screams, male and female, and of bullets plowing into flesh, mixed with the crack-crack of the 9mm ammunition as it fired.

Iosef Aliyev withdrew his arm just as the two broken and blasted bodies tumbled limply to the bottom of the stairs. He then put two more bullets in them, just to make sure. Smoking gun still in hand, he keyed the door closed, and turned towards the shocked Nikolay and Kirill.

"You should have more faith in me, my friends," he said with a small grin, walking towards the glass window. "Now, how are our unwelcome guests doing…?"

* * *

_Icarus-032_ was attached to Seiran Mountain's 1st Platoon, and currently on loan to the two Experimental Squads: India and Juliet. Its main purpose was data collection and path finding. This meant it loitered high in the air over an area and maintained a constant vigil over alien movements, the locations of crashed UFOs, any nearby civilian traffic, and other matters of operational interest. This information was then distributed to both Command and Field Agents as the local TACMAP, and automatically refreshed on a 'turn by turn' basis every second and a half.

The _Icarus_ class UAV designated number 032, call sign "Roaming Susan," was cruising leisurely at an altitude of around twelve thousand feet when an emergency control override came in from HQ. All _Icarus_ class UAVs were based on alien technology, and resembled UFOs to a great degree, or to be more exact: Cyberdisks. This made them extremely stealthy and quite maneuverable, traits well suited for reconnaissance, but due to certain doctrinal limitations (that pesky Section Seven) they were unarmed.

At the time of their first deployment, there had actually been some controversy regarding the extent to which UNETCO could use alien technology to develop better recon elements. The aliens had jamming technology that made normal means of observation, from Radar to normal UAVs, unreliable. On the other hand, the nations of the world were not keen on UNETCO being able to effectively spy at will anywhere in the world, even after they had total access to the global satellite network. In the end, UNETCO's use of the drones had been deemed necessary, but they were still something of a global privacy hot topic among those in the UNETCO international cadre.

Regardless of "Susan" being unarmed, she, like all her Icarus brothers and sisters, also had another purpose. An initially unofficial one. Soon after they had been introduced, a Squad commander had noticed how the _Icarus_ class had a generous amount of unused internal volume originally intended for weapons, but now reserved for 'electronic observation hardware expansion.' He had gotten the inspired idea to keep one of his UAVs low to the surface (around only a thousand feet or so) and use it to carry an emergency heavy weapon. If the weapon was needed, the UAV would be ordered to land nearby, and the required trooper could just retrieve it on the spot.

After a year, this caught on, and the engineers at several bases had made custom modifications to their UAVs to improve on "in combat drop/lift capability." So when Susan got the signal from HQ that someone down below needed something, it wasn't anything terribly new or unexpected. The fact that it would have to perform an insertion at sea, a first for any of the _Icarus_ class, never crossed its relatively simple and straightforward programming. Susan treated it like any other insertion event.

Two seconds after the message was received it had already calculated how it would insert, and the tiny matter-antimatter Elerium reactor onboard began to radiate directed gravity waves. It was a maneuvering quirk of the gravity drive that propelled it that the most efficient movements were not curves, but straight lines. Aerodynamics did not factor into it; the alien drive could propel a brick at Mach 6 in any direction… provided that brick was made out of alloys and properly shielded against the stresses of being torn through the air.

Susan, like any of its UFO forebears, thus moved in a nausea inducing zig zag fashion, zipping straight from one way point to another, without any respect for this thick atmosphere it pushed its way through. It moved to a point in space, stopped on a dime exactly there, and then moved on. For navigation purposes, it pulsed its reactor, moving in characteristic skips like a rock skimming across the top of a lake.

Shampoo shielded her eyes as a blast of hot air and light appeared nearby.

Lowering her arm, she approached the hovering saucer, and a second later its underside opened up and peeled back, like the lid of a can. Fixed in place there was a large weapon and a spare medikit, and on top of them, another large device. Shampoo grabbed the both, and strapped the device to her back. Its insertion accomplished, "Roaming Susan" shot straight back up into the air to resume its previous flight course, moving in a perfect square in the sky.

"'Section Seven repealed for this mission,' huh?" the conscripted Amazon asked, hefting the 23 pound T-8A1 Advanced Tactical Laser Platform and getting a good feel for the powerful weapon in her hands.

"Well….!" She smirked viciously; eyes alight with the promise of a soon to be defeated enemy. Of course, the Sectopod down below would target her above all others when it realized she could actually damage and blind it, and there was as little chance of 'sneaking' up on it as there was an Ethereal (a creature that perceived its environment in all directions as once), so she would only get one free shot. Hopefully, she could make that one shot count…

"I have the package and I am in position!" she announced, nearing the edge of the gap she had opened between the hangar doors.

"I'm counting on all of you," Ranma's confident tone, when it came, filled her with resolve. "Let's do it!"

* * *

Ryouga watched Ranma with respect, and more than a little veiled envy. Leave it to the annoying pigtailed martial artist to come up with a plan this insane. If it had been up to him, he would have just let Shampoo snipe down at the Sectopod, and hope that she and Mousse could throw enough firepower at the problem to reduce the damn thing to molten slag. Failing that, he'd have tried to collapse the entire room in on it somehow. Ranma, of course, had to have some sort of elaborate back up to seize (or steal) the win, in case the first attack plan failed.

But as he had no ostensibly better strategy, Ranma's would have to suffice.

A second after stepping out from behind the concealing and protective cover of the now decimated and partly crumbled helipad; he saw that half second flicker of light descend from above on the freshly risen Sectopod. The beam dwelled in place perfectly on the top of the 'head' and over what they had been taught was the primary omnidirectional sensing apparatus, leaving a scorched crack in the armor, and hopefully blinding it as well. Still, it had just started to turn to engage Shampoo from her perch high above, paired plasma cannons glowing deathly hot, when Ryouga unleashed the _shishi hokoudan_ he had been building between his hands. Depressed thoughts of failure and inevitable defeat mixed with the still simmering jealousy he felt towards his always happy prodigy of a rival.

The screaming ball of _ki_ shot from between his clenched fingers, plowing into the front of the Sectopod with enough force to level any home smaller than the Tendo Dojo. The mental energy fizzled against the alien metal, but the Sectopod paused for just a moment and in that moment, Ryouga could see that Ranma's hunch had been correct regarding the Sectood's greatest weakness. Leave it to Ranma to notice a little thing like that in the heart of battle…!

The Sectopod fired up, but the moment's delay had brought Shampoo just a little extra time to haul ass and get out of the cone of fire, in addition to confirming Ranma's plan as having a chance of success. Paired particle streams annihilated the area Shampoo had sniped from, raining melted steel in every direction. Hopefully, Shampoo was safe and getting set up to take her next shot.

Ryouga pushed off the ground, adjusting his heading towards the Sectopod, and taking the chance to look to his right. There, Ranma and Ukyou were pushing off another wall, headed towards the same target. Perhaps it was her alien alloy weapon, or the fact that nothing Ranma and Ryouga had done came close to damaging the automaton, or the fact that it had noticed she was slightly slower than either of the two Squad leaders, but the Sectopod tended to target her if there was any opportunity.

This time, though, just as Ranma had predicted, the Sectopod kept facing upward, identifying Shampoo as its biggest (or only) actual threat. Time for Phase Three. Snagging a fallen I beam along his trajectory, he spun as he moved, swinging the massive steel girder not at the Sectopod itself, but at its wiring just above it. Ryouga put all his strength into the swing, knowing just how important it was to get those razor wires out of the way. The I-beam hit them straight on, and the force transferred down the nearly invisible wires and into where they were gravitically moored with the ceiling and walls of the hangar.

With a squealing crash, two chunks of the ceiling and one piece of the wall ripped free. Just an instant later, Ukyou came in, and with a yell, she wedged the flat of her mega spatula under the Sectopod's right foot, slipping between the base of it and the metal floor. Whatever field held the foot securely in place, in that instant, switched from the floor to Ukyou's weapon.

Only then did Ranma land on the top of the Sectopod, his back to the I-beam. Thankfully, it held against the alien wire which cut into it, allowing Ranma to act without worrying about being sliced or skewered. He reached down to the robot with glowing hands, each one cradling a small ball of _ki_. One was confidence, and the other depression: Ranma was using the _shishi hokoudan_ with one hand, the _moko takabisha_ with the other.

Ryouga hadn't even considered such a thing possible.

Ranma then pushed his hands together and forced them both to a point just above the 'brain' of the Sectopod. The two energies began to mix and annihilate in a spray of sparks, sending crackles of dissonant mental energy in every direction. The Sectopod was not a robot, after all, it was an empty shell controlled by the aliens from afar. And the means used to control the robot: psionics. This was why, when a Cyberdisk or Sectopod was sighted, the first thing a trooper was supposed to do was alert Command and identify it for a follow up psionic attack.

Ranma was doing the next best thing: he was disrupting the mental connection between the Sectopod and the alien controlling it. And it seemed to be working! The Sectopod froze in position, showing no sign of the usually active back and forth sway of target searching and acquisition. At that moment, Ryu swooped in, ready for Phase Four. Ryouga only hoped Ranma could keep it up.

"ARGH!" Ranma hissed, face flinching.

"Reformed Style!" Ryu cried, body blurring as he jumped within range of the paralyzed Sectopod. "Kinshi Kinbakusho!"

The original _Yamasenken_ 'Gold Cord Tight Binding Soar' used normal rope to tie someone up at super high speed, taking advantage of upper body strength and centripetal motion. The newer variant of the technique that Ryu had developed for his Reformed style was more deadly, aiming not to immobilize the arms, but instead to string up the neck. Even then, for this opponent, he had to improvise.

Coiling a knot around the Sectopod's right leg, just where the joint connected it with the main body, he rocketed upwards, jumping more than fifty feet into the air. Everyone on the intercom could hear Ranma struggling, and it redoubled their efforts. Ryu hooked the edge of the open roof of the hangar with one hand, pulled himself up, and quickly began to secure the coil with a large clip-hook nearby. In only a few seconds, he was gone, accomplishing the task faster than any of them could have.

"Ready!" he barked.

Immediately, the crane high above him started to retract the line. Kuno was at the controls, thankfully getting a basic operational understanding of them with a little coaching from an old friend back at SigInt. At full automatic retract, it was only a few seconds before the cable and the cord went taunt, and the Sectopod found itself being torn from its position inside the hangar. The right leg lifted without a hitch, since it was anchoring itself onto Ukyou's mega spatula. The effect seemed restricted to fighting tension and not sheer stress, as Ukyou found herself able to "slide" her weapon off the base of the foot without great difficulty.

"I… can't…" Ranma hissed, aura fading.

The Sectopod's two weapons pods began to swivel, the ends starting to glow brilliant white. Ryouga let go of the I-beam he had been holding in place, seeing Ukyou have trouble wedging her weapon under the other foot. Slamming his hand onto the floor, and triggering an unspoken breaking point, he tore apart the metal railing around the Sectopod's left foot, weakening it enough for the might of the cargo crane to finally tear it free.

Ranma rolled off the side of the alien terror unit as it was dragged bodily into the air by the coil around its right leg joint. The I-beam, too, fell away, just before the Sectopod crashed into the open mouth of the hangar ceiling. With a screech of tortured metal, it was pulled through the gap. Two final plasma blasts rained down, coring the center of the _Procyon_ through the ground and down into the final outer layer of the hull. Twin fountains of water shot up, threatening to flood the section of the ship.

-----

Finally, walking out from behind cover, the pieces of his previously hidden weapon now together once more, Mousse licked his lips. Strapped to his back was a Mechem N.T.W. 20mm Anti Material Rifle, considered by some to be the most powerful man-portable cannon in the world. But resting in his arms was his first choice, and his best hope, in taking out the alien robot: the M-144 ATX, a reuseable recoilless anti-tank weapon, utilizing special 84mm warheads. This was UNETCO's premier earth-tech rocket launcher.

The hangar had been a horribly confined space, definitely not suitable to the use of any sort of rocket ordinance. Plus, it was so small that even the short ranged HEAT round (much less the SABOT) would have been unable to arm itself properly. Now, though, with the Sectopod dangling in the air by its right leg, he was free to cut loose and unload. And at the moment, Mousse had a 4.0kg warhead capable of penetrating 400mm of rolled homogeneous steel, and he was just dying to make introductions.

"Say cheese!" He cried, taking aim and launching the pre-loaded armor defeating missile. As the fin-stabilized warhead tore through the air towards its helpless target, a vectored backblast and counter-mass in the rear of the ATX compensated for the gout of fire and force that erupted out the back end of the weapon. The ATX was designed to be fired in much more confined spaces than any other weapons system of its type, and while it could be reloaded with another missile tube, Mousse tossed it aside.

Even he couldn't hide more than one anti-tank missile under his robes.

* * *

Shampoo whistled appreciatively as the suspended Sectopod became engulfed in a bright light. For a second, she forgot about taking another shot of her own, instead watching to see if even this alien monstrosity could survive a HEAT missile up its ass. As the thinning smoke cleared, however, she saw with growing awe that the Sectopod was charred, damaged, but still operational. The strange prongs on its back swiveled in place, alien alloy skin shifting and reforming on command.

Thunk!

Thunk!

"It's still alive!" Shampoo cried, firing her heavy laser again at the tenacious construct. Sectopod sensors were very vulnerable to lasers, but that still left the body and the weapons to contend with. She aimed for the underside, and clearly hit something. A piece of fractured alien alloy armor fell from the now spinning Sectopod. Fire from down below matched her own, as 20mm high explosive shells hit the thing at over two thousand feet per second.

Finally, with a crash, its right leg tore clean off and it fell to the deck of the ship. For a second, Shampoo let herself believe it was finally done for. Then her _sakkijutsu_ sounded, like a scream in her right ear, forcing her to dive to the left. A clean hole punched through the cargo container that had been partly providing cover to her flank. The damn thing was still alive, still firing, and still trying to kill her!

"A device of such tenacious and frightful construction may yet require the blade of Tatewaki Kuno!" Kuno exclaimed, the sound of him running down metal stairs also sounding over his activated comm. link. "Stand firm, my friends! I come now to your aid!"

Shampoo lifted herself off the ground, only to duck again as a wild plasma burst shot over her head. She could just imagine India Squad's chief blockhead running towards the thing, sword in hand, and getting reduced to so much charred bone. His stupid sword would probably survive this time, while its master was incinerated.

She banished the thought and instead looked to her side. Nearby, she could see Mousse drag himself up from the hangar, hauling the nearly sixty pound Mechem N.T.W along on his back. He quickly found cover, and whipped the massive weapon out; holding it like a normal soldier would a sniper rifle.

"It's almost dead!" Mousse yelled encouragingly. "Shampoo! Let's finish it!"

Carefully standing, getting her aim ready, she got a look at the fallen Sectopod. It was flailing around on the ground with only one leg, trying to turn itself so that it could get a clean shot at them. Of the four prongs on its back, only the forward facing one on the left was still moving, searching desperately for something to snag with a grapple wire. But there was nothing but open air in that direction for miles.

Safely outside the crippled terror unit's line of fire, Shampoo and Mousse circled it, firing again and again. AMR rounds exploded, destroying anything nearby and shredding steel like cardboard. Heavy laser beams cut into and blew holes in alien alloys, leaving the air reeking of ionized ozone. Mousse reloaded, while Shampoo just depressed the trigger and held her aim steady. With thunderous booms, Mousse joined her again, until finally a red warning light flashed on the side of her laser's command display. It was overheating.

She relaxed her finger off the trigger, and a few shots later, Mousse stopped too.

The crumpled and ruined remains of the Sectopod didn't move.

"Huh!" Mousse lowered his weapon; it was longer than he was tall, and smoking like a yakuza mobster from having fired so much in so short a time. "Well, that wasn't so hard, now was it?"

"You weren't being shot at," Shampoo quipped, sighing in relief.

"Oh my god! Ranma!" Ukyou's scream interrupted them, and Shampoo rushed over and jumped down into the hangar without a second's hesitation. Inside was a complete mess, and as if to make matters worse, it was flooding. Ryu and the lost boy seemed to already be working on tearing down the reinforced door the ship scientists had been hiding behind.

Ranma, though, was holding his face, and Ukyou was hovering next to him, holding a medikit tightly in her hands. Shampoo ran over, her pace slowing when she realized she didn't have any idea what the problem was, or how she could help more than Ukyou already was. Getting closer, she still couldn't see. But if he was holding his face…

"Ranma?" Shampoo asked, trying to get a better look.

"Shit!" Ranma cursed, tentatively letting his hand move away from the side of his face, below the three circular optics that were part and parcel of the stealth suit's HUD. Between his fingers, Shampoo could see dark skin, too brown to be Ranma's.

"This is Special Lieutenant Saotome," he said, obviously 'talking' to Command. "I've lost suit containment. Ahh!" he hissed, in obvious pain. "I don't think I've been exposed to anything, but I can't say for sure."

He quickly took the Medikit from Ukyou, and tucking it under his arm, he jumped up, heading for the surface. Shampoo was on the verge of following him, when it occurred to her to just ask Ukyou what the hell had just happened.

"What...?" she started.

"A… a piece of metal. Melted metal. It fell on his face," the other girl explained, turned, and made her own jump. Shampoo looked up at Ukyou's retreating form, water rising to ankle depth, unsure what to say or do. Ranma had been hurt plenty of times before, but this sounded bad.

Nearby, a handful of men cried as they were dragged out of their refuge.

* * *

Just a few hours earlier:

The dirty blue pickup truck slowed to a stop, black tires slicing a shallow trench in the dusty gravel and packed soil of the road. Its pit stop was a lonely little repair shop and gas station in the middle of no where, farmland and wilderness dominating the landscape for miles in every direction. While it was located off of what passed for a main road, the small station didn't seem likely to get much traffic, aside from the locals.

The driver's side door opened first, and a light skinned Chinese man wearing polished black army boots stepped out. Following his lead, the other door also opened, and another light skinned man of the same ethnicity, in appearance just a few years younger, exited the vehicle. This one's dusty black work boots seemed scuffed and abused from years of use. Both wore loose dark pants, and plain white shirts, with matching caps shading their eyes.

"Good to get a bit of a stretch…!" The man from the passenger side of the truck said, stretching his arms and craning his neck back and forth, working the kinks out of it.

The only man with the clean boots grunted in agreement, walking towards the small repair shop. His companion, meanwhile, started to inspect the small and rather old fashioned petrol pump they'd parked near to. Entering the un-air-conditioned shop with a chime of bells set up behind the door, the driver headed immediately past the clerk to the back, where a small selection of cooled beverages were on sale.

The clerk watched him like a hawk, while an obvious relative of the store's owner also made sure the pump outside wasn't abused. It was getting dark, and you never could tell, this far out in the middle of no where, who would try and rob you. A small portable fan spun leisurely, its pace matching the slow but steady trickle of time, paired to the faint tick tock of an old clock.

The stranger placed his purchases on the counter: a six pack of beer, four coca colas, a pack of cigarettes, a small bag of chips, and a local paper. The clerk looked over the purchases, doing the math in his head, and studying the man in front of him. His cap said "Zhong Fireworks." He definitely didn't look like a sun beaten local hand.

"ID?" the clerk asked, patting the top of the six pack of beer.

The man opposite made a displeased face, but fished out his wallet without verbal complaint. The driver's license identified him as a "Mr. Zhong," from Xining. Still, it seemed legitimate enough. Truth be told, the clerk had been more curious about it than concerned that his customer was under age or anything like that. He named a price; the man paid it, and slowly walked out the door.

'Fireworks?' he briefly wondered, noting the pickup truck out front with several large boxes tied securely to the cargo bed. 'Must be for Christmas, or the Western New year…'

Double counting the money, he promptly dismissed the whole affair.

The truck drove off, heading south.

-----


	54. The Meaning of Fear III

Ranma stared at himself in the mirror, fingers gently tracing the scar that ran down his face from just behind his eye to nearly the curve of his jaw. It didn't hurt much anymore, thanks to the medikit pain killers, but the burn was pretty deep and pretty bad. He would heal, quickly, but it was doubtful that there wouldn't be any residual scarring. It was an ugly black mark on his face, and he wondered at that thought what Akane would say when she saw it.

He smiled ruefully; she'd probably yell at him for being careless.

At least he didn't have any sort of infection. The auto-diagnosis equipment in the kit had given him a clean bill of health, and he had learned to trust in XCOM's scientific analysis. Washing his face carefully, not wanting to trigger his girl-curse, Ranma felt silently grateful for that too. Scars weren't that bad on a guy, but it definitely wouldn't do any favors for his girl side's looks.

Drying off his face, also very carefully, with some paper towels he left the washroom to check on things. The ship's flooding had been contained, so the ship wouldn't sink until they were ready to blow the charges Mousse had placed inside it. His own _ki_ levels were low, very low, but recovering. The ship was secure, though no one quite knew what to do with the infected prisoners in the biolab. They'd probably just have to shoot them.

Then there was a related issue: Intel had gotten word to them that, based on info they gleaned from the hijacked computers on board, it was highly likely that a large quantity of the prepared chemical weapon developed on the ship had been smuggled off it. Apparently a small scout or something around its size had landed on the ship, picked up at least half the developed supply of the weapon, and taken off. UNETCO had detected the scout during one leg of its flight, on radar, but it was low to the ground and by the time an Interceptor was in the area it had disappeared.

"Are you alright, Saotome-taichou?" Konatsu asked, catching up to him as he walked. The ninja boy, Ranma knew, felt bad having to hold himself back during the Sectopod fight. But it had been important that, no matter what, at least one member of the two squads remained out of danger and ready to complete the mission and destroy the ship. Besides, Konatsu's skills weren't exactly geared towards fighting indestructible killbots.

"Fine," Ranma replied, ignoring the slight numbness in his jaw, an after effect of the pain dopers. He had his helmet off, which meant he was out of contact with Command at the moment. "Anything new?"

"Hibiki-taichou is pressing Command for an interrogation of the prisoners here, instead of bringing them back to base. He believes it may save lives, if an attack is planned within the next twelve hours."

Ranma let out a suffering sigh. Interrogation? This mission was just getting better and better. But the lost boy had a point. It would take a while to get the _Procyon_ scientists back to Seiran for a proper brain picking. They could at least try and get some of the more important info out of the bastards here, first.

"I can see why," Ranma said, as the two took a flight of stairs down, heading to the engineering lab where the scientists were currently kept under separate confinement in their rooms. All but two were present and accounted for; the bodies of a man and woman had been found in an emergency alcove shortly after the others had been captured. They had been killed, obviously, but the find had meant no one had to worry about two escapees getting off ship. It was a harsh, cold attitude to have towards the dead, but Ranma just reminded himself of what they had done, and what they planned to do.

Just because they were dead, killed, didn't make them innocent or blameless.

"He is talking to Commander Yasuda right now," Konatsu elaborated. "He believes I may be of some use in the work as well."

"Well, I'm sure you have some ninja-tricks or something, right?" Ranma asked. "For getting people to spill their guts and stuff?"

"I do," the genius _kunoichi _admitted. "But… we are part of a United Nations agency. Would such unsavory methods be allowed? Is not torture prohibited by…?"

"Konatsu," Ranma interrupted. "This ain't no normal UN outfit, ok? We do what we gotta do. If the order comes in, you follow it."

"Yes, sir. I just wanted to hear it from you, that's all," Konatsu's meek tone belied the sort of things Ranma suspected he could do, if ordered to extract information from an unwilling subject by any means necessary. Of course, there was also the question of how often (if at all) Konatsu had done this sort of thing before, back when he'd been an _active_ member of the tiny ninja community. It wasn't something he was sure he wanted to know.

Ranma slipped his helmet back on.

"…well, Hibiki. I've considered your request, and given the information Intel has here, it looks like your concern may be justified. But I want Aliyev alive. The others, too, if possible. That includes the Captain."

"And the Mind Probe?" Ryouga asked. Ranma wondered, at that moment, why they hadn't set up a separate channel for this conversation, if Konatsu could listen in. Quickly checking, he saw it was a secure channel, just that Konatsu had been given security access.

"Section Seven may no longer be relevant to this mission, Special Lieutenant, but a Mind Probe can be very dangerous if used improperly." Commander Yasuda was clearly a little apprehensive about allowing them to use it for the interrogation. Ranma wasn't sure he blamed her. He'd heard stories, after all… though he still hadn't read that damn manual! Definitely by the next mission. Definitely.

"However, under these circumstances, I will allow it. But if Aliyev is unable to answer questions when he gets back here because of brain damage, I _will_ be most displeased. Get to it, gentlemen. Yasuda out."

"Konatsu," Ryouga asked a few seconds after the Commander had left. "Does Ranma have his helmet on yet?"

"I'm here," Ranma resisted adding a quip to his statement, tempering his generally playful attitude with the knowledge of what they had to do. "I heard the last half minute or so."

The lost one got straight to the point. "Ranma. I'd like to have Konatsu handle the other two researchers while we take care of Aliyev and then the Captain."

"You're actually going to use the Mind Probe?" Ranma asked, knowing what it meant. It would still be torture. Probably as bad, if not worse, than anything Konatsu was capable of.

"Of course," Ryouga's voice didn't display even a sliver of hesitation. "I'll personally tear the information out of his mind. You took care of that Sectopod, Ranma. Let me do this, at least."

Ranma contemplated telling Ryouga to let him handle it, but…

"Fine," Ranma acquiesced. His head wasn't totally clear at the moment anyway, so that was as good an excuse as any to let the lost boy take the job. The apprehension he felt about mentally raping another human being for information was a fact he would keep to himself.

"Konatsu," he then said. "Do whatever you have to."

"I see…" the ninja boy replied softly. "How much time do I have?"

"An hour," Ryouga answered curtly.

"I will need a medikit, but I can do them both in the same room." Konatsu continued. "Please have no one interrupt me."

"Done and done," Ranma promised him, laying a hand on the young _kunoichi's_ shoulder. "You're a good man, Konatsu."

His team mate only nodded ever so slightly, a silently menacing air to him.

He and Konatsu soon parted ways, as Ranma switched partners to Ryouga outside the room they had picked out to interrogate Aliyev in. The other two men had been taken downstairs, to a small storage room ancillary to the main engineering workshop. Aliyev, ironically enough, would remain in his original room. Ryouga had pointed out that a setting like that was already ideal – the Mind Probe was designed to automatically isolate and take advantage of emotional imbalances and strong memories.

Barring that, there was always simple, straightforward pain.

Aliyev sat alone in his room, hands tied together in his lap. Seeing the two soldiers enter the room, their helmets off, he appeared initially shocked.

"You're children!" he exclaimed, his English more than passable.

Ranma closed the door behind them with an ominous thud.

"Doctor Iosef Aliyev," Ryouga began, pointing to the disk-like Mind Probe strapped securely around his right arm. "Do you know what this is?"

The scientist's eyes focused on the device, but he didn't reply.

"This is a Mind Probe. Technology captured from your alien friends. I'm going to use it to find out the truth." Ryouga's scowl was deep enough to bear his slightly over-large canines. "I've been on the receiving end of this sort of thing, Doctor. It isn't pleasant."

"Keh!" The Russian laughed derisively. "Do you think you can intimidate me, boy?"

"Answer our questions, and you'll be fine." Ranma, without meaning to or planning on playing the part of 'good cop' none-the-less ended up doing so.

"You'll tell us what we want either way," Ryouga added, walking closer to the man.

Aliyev's eyes darted from one squad leader to the next, before he let out a long, deep sigh and gave up. "Very well, gentlemen. I won't resist."

"Good," Ranma spoke up, giving Ryouga a look that told him to back off, if only for the moment. The other fighter did so, leaning against the wall, waiting for the chance to pounce.

"What were you making here?" Ranma asked, starting simply.

"A bio weapon," Aliyev admitted. "Based on the _ebola_ virus. You must know I worked for the _rodina_, the Soviet Union, and that I was part of their bioweapons program. I made a few tweaks so that it would survive longer underwater, and…"

"You're lying…" Ryouga hissed.

"And, of course, some modifications so it would change the victim's physiology. Affecting the renal system, and…"

Ranma turned to Ryouga; he was shaking his head.

"I want the truth, Doctor," Ranma said to the captive scientist. "If the Mind Probe says you're lying, then it means you are."

"I assure you, young man, I am not lying," Iosef insisted. "If you like, I can spell out in detail how we mutated the virus sample, and where we obtained it."

Ranma seemed about to open his mouth and ask again, when he shook his head sadly and walked back to the door. It was a long couple steps, drawing the moment out and leaving Aliyev alone in his half of the room with India Squad's Special Lieutenant.

"See?" Ryouga asked his old rival as he pushed off the wall, before facing Aliyev. "I knew it would come to this."

He briefly closed his eyes.

"Switching Mind Probe from passive to active… " The lost one opened his eyes and stared at the Doctor. "Doctor Aliyev. What were you making?"

"I told you, I…" Iosef gasped, and lost his breath. Briefly biting his lip, he closed his eyes. Ranma, watching from next to the door, wondered what he was doing.

"Reciting lyrics? Math equations? Nursery rhymes?" Ryouga asked, looming closer to the man. "It won't work. What were you making in your lab?"

Aliyev grunted, shaking his head.

"I see… chemical names. I almost have it…" Ryouga paused. "He's clearing his mind. He knows about the Mind Probe, and he's clearing his mind."

"I don't know..." Aliyev began, but never finished.

"You know!" Ryouga struck him, a hard backhand to the face that split the man's upper lip open. Blood hit the wall behind the bed. Ryouga twitched - his expression turning triumphant.

"They call it Venom. The weapon is… a refined version of Chryssalid toxin," Ryouga announced, as if experiencing a revelation. "It's airborne. Even… even a tiny amount entering the lungs is fatal. There is no antidote. No cure. No way to inoculate a victim. The aliens gave them eggs, and they used… they infected people with them. Made baby Chryssalids to harvest the first few grams of the toxin. Six people… I… I can see their face as he infected them!"

Ranma sneered in disgust.

But Aliyev just smiled, cradling his bloody mouth. "And how many people have you two killed today, hmmm?"

"Who were they, you bastard?" Ranma asked, stepping angrily towards the vile researcher and ignoring his question about their own morality. Aliyev's face straightened; his smile fading.

"Who the hell were they?" Ranma repeated, louder.

Ryouga's eyes narrowed, and through the alien circuitry of the Mind Probe, his mental energy assailed the scientist's brain. The questions prompted answers, even unspoken ones, deep within Iosef's consciousness. The Mind Probe found those newly appearing images and thoughts, zeroed in on them like a guided missile, and tore them free. He grimaced in discomfort.

"Just some Filipino trash we picked up," he spat out, a headache growing in the back of his brain. "They were the most useless sort of person - the kind who can contribute more to the world in death than in life."

"You…!" Ryouga seemed on the verge of punching the man's head clean off. Ranma, to his own distaste, found himself restraining his comrade in arms.

"Command wants him alive," Ranma reminded him.

Ryouga took a deep breath, and nodded slowly.

Aliyev chuckled at the display. "Young people are so emotional now-a-days…"

"Doctor," Ranma said and turned back to the matter at hand. "We know you've managed to smuggle some of your Venom off the ship. Where is it? Who has it?"

The sadistic scientist's face was impassive as he answered, "Dick and Laura Cheney."

Ryouga roughly pushed Ranma aside, staring the man right in the face.

"Where was it taken?" he repeated. "You know the answer. **Where?!**"

Aliyev looked away, resisting, clearing his thoughts.

Reaching down to the man's right hand, Ryouga straightened out his index finger, and in a single move grasped the tip of it and pulled up. The fingernail popped out with a sick sound that reminded Ranma of Kasumi tearing pieces out of a head of lettuce. Aliyev screamed, and slammed the back of his head against the wall.

" China… China… somewhere in China…" Ryouga gasped, and pointed at one of the bed pillows. "Ranma!"

"Right!" the pigtailed young man quickly grabbed one of the foam cored pillows and propped it against the back of Aliyev's head, keeping him from knocking himself unconscious.

"Where are they, Aliyev!?" Ryouga snarled. "Targets? Testing? Where? Where?!"

Iosef spat into the air, and Ryouga reached for his hand again, this time seizing his right middle finger. The scientist's breath came in ragged gasps, but when he spoke, it was more obfuscation.

"Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars!"

With another disgusting snap, Ryouga removed a second fingernail and put pressure on the exposed flesh.

"Tell me!" he roared.

Aliyev heaved in pain, his words coming out as little more than a gurgle.

"South!" Ryouga exclaimed. "South? A big city in the south! Something important! Ships! Lots of ships! S… S… Singapore?"

The Special Lieutenant took an instinctive step away from the alien sympathizer… no: terrorist. He was a terrorist of the worst order. For his part, Ranma couldn't believe it either.

" Singapore?" he asked, having trouble wrapping his mind around it.

"The main target is Singapore!" Ryouga shook his head, stunned. "Millions of people…!"

"Why?" Ranma asked, voice low. Then he whirled on Aliyev, shaking him by the front of his shirt. "Why?!"

The terrorist slowly composed himself and licked his split lip.

"Names," he replied. "And we'll get them, too. Because if we don't, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, San Francisco… we'll show the great cities of those who fund you the meaning of fear."

"Names?" Ranma asked, not totally understanding.

"Our names," Ryouga clarified, "And the names of our families. There was something else, too. Another smaller test target, to make sure they got the delivery system right."

Ranma was about to demand an answer from Aliyev, but the man just shrugged.

"I don't know where they plan to test it," he admitted, seeming to tell the truth for the first time. "Some shit-hole village in the middle of nowhere, probably. It hardly matters."

"How the hell can you call yourself a human being?" Ranma asked without thinking, anger and outrage getting the better of him.

"How can you?" Aliyev asked snidely. "The aliens, the _Visitors_, have guided humanity for millennia. They're our protectors. Our _protectors_! Without them, we wouldn't even be here! We owe them everything, and what do we do? We take people like you…" he turned his eyes on Ryouga with a look of pure hate. "And you. And we turn on the creatures that nurtured us and gave us sentience."

"If God exists…" Aliyev jumped off the bed and walked up to the lost boy, sneering. "People like you would try to kill him!"

Ranma just grabbed the deranged scientist by his right arm and tossed him back onto his bed. Ryouga's expression was a dangerous mix of confusion and anger, as he tried to assemble some sort of response. He never did; Ranma motioned with his head, and the two backed off towards the door.

"This is what we were told to find," he reminded India Squad's officer. " Singapore… and another target in China. Probably rural."

"More than that," Ryouga shifted out of a confrontational mode, a degree of calm returning as the seriousness of the situation became impossible to ignore. "There's a stockpile somewhere. They want to be able to launch separate attacks."

"I don't suppose you got any more names of contacts?"

Ryouga shook his head. "Just the three pseudonyms Konatsu found out about."

"Ok. You'd better inform Command. We'll let them plan the next move, and then blow this ship." Ranma looked over his shoulder. "I'll be out in a second."

Ryouga ran a hand through his hair, tension slowly leaving his body. He and Ranma exchanged looks of agreement, and a second later he left the room. The pigtailed one remained, and he watched as Aliyev sucked on his two fingers, now missing fingernails.

"Doctor Aliyev," he began, slowly, making sure the man heard and understood him. "No matter what they did for us in the past, there's no excusing what they're doing in the present. There's no excusing what you've done, either, Doctor, which is why I want to make sure you know what's going to happen next. What we did back there was just the tip of the iceberg. You think this was an interrogation? The real one hasn't even started yet!"

"We're going to take you to a deep, dark hole in the Earth somewhere, and when you get there, Doctor…" Ranma scowled, and turned away, placing his hand on the handle of the door. "May that God you mentioned have mercy on your soul."

Stepping out and closing the door behind him, Ranma never saw the look of panic appear on Doctor Iosef Aliyev's face.

* * *

When the charges detonated, there was no great explosion; no Hollywood fireball. There was just a distant rumble, heard by none. In the darkness of the night, the _Procyon_ shuddered and silently slipped under the waves, taking over forty lives with it into the deep. In time, the wreck would be found, and some scraps of knowledge gleaned from the wreckage.

But not by human hands.

* * *

The blue pickup truck slowed to a stop, leaving a trail of flattened grass in its wake. Inside, one of the two men, the one in the passenger side, checked a hand held GPS device. Double checking with the map unfolded on his lap, he turned to the driver.

"We're here," he said, hand patting the map. "Right on target."

The silent driver nodded, and the duo exited the vehicle.

It was still dark, but walking close to the edge of the sheer cliff they'd driven along, following a dusty road barely wide enough to support a car, they were treated to a bird's eye view. Below and just in the distance, set against a backdrop of pristine mountains, pinpricks of reflected light could be seen, as if from a multitude of small ponds. Further along the road, but still down in the valley and to the north, a few scattered lights betrayed the location of a small village.

"Smell that crisp mountain air!" the man with the GPS declared, taking in a deep, almost exaggerated, breath. "Aaahhh! Nothing like it in the world!"

The other man didn't reply, but he did take a deep breath of his own.

"Well…" the nature lover prompted, facing his companion. "Shall we?"

"Let's," the other man agreed. Together, they started unloading the back of their pickup truck. A crowbar helped open the crates marked "Zhong Fireworks Company" revealing first a metal scaffold, and then a small number of electronics. One of the men ducked into the back of the truck, behind the front passenger side seat, and came back with a laptop in one hand, and a _coca cola_ in the other.

The faint light of a burning cigarette in the silent man's mouth disappeared under the glow of a lantern and a pair of flash lights. With practiced ease, they worked, setting up the scaffold, and then removing the fireworks. The rockets were large – very large, and sophisticated. The silent man snuffed out his cigarette, flicking it into the middle of the road, as he worked on putting it all together.

In the last box sat an unmarked metal crate, heavily reinforced.

The more talkative of the two men finally reached down and removed it. Using a bronze key, he unlocked the top, sliding the two halves apart. Strapped down securely inside were two canisters, side by side. Each was a dull grey bearing a single red stripe.

As one discarded coca cola can turned to three, joined by as many beers, the fireworks scaffold took final form… as did the pair of rockets mounted on top of it. A small white scrap of cloth flapped in the wind nearby. It was almost time. Gently, the 'firecrackers' had their cargo loaded aboard. The grey cases, when twisted, lit up with small yellow lights.

Finally, the work was done.

Taking a long drag from his cigarette, the silent man, "Mr Zhong," checked his wrist watch. It was a nice night, and they'd been able to do their work undisturbed. The maps and the GPS allowed them to set up in just the right place, and they'd set the timers just like they'd been told. Everything was exactly as it should be. Flicking the spent cig out and over the edge of the cliff, he turned his back to the distant village. They didn't have to hit it exactly; they only had to get it close.

"Three, two, one," the other, more talkative, man exclaimed. "Fire!"

The first mini-missile took off with a roar and a squeal, heading north. The light from its engine was clear enough against the dark sky and countryside, but after a trip of several seconds, it disappeared. Swiveling the scaffold slightly, they fired again, this second missile flying a similar distance before fading into the night.

"Not much of a bang, huh?" The chatty fellow remarked, walking casually over to the edge. A few loose rocks tumbled down the sheer sides, splashing into water down below.

The silent man stood nearby, lighting another cig.

"Give it an hour or two," he said, cupping the light of his burning cancer stick. "_Then_ we'll see some fireworks."

Far below, another Tragedy was brewing in Jyusenkyou...


	55. The Twilight of the Amazons I

Sorry its been so long since the last update, all, but that's how things turn out sometimes... there was the usual RL things to take care of, and this chapter was actually one of the harder ones to finish to my satisfaction. More than perhaps any other chapter, I kept second guessing how I wanted to approach this arc of the story through the different characters. This was and is also the only arc in the story where I planned to utilize an alien POV to a significant degree, so how to handle that just right delayed it as well. Well, I guess I'm rambling at this point. I don't normally write authors notes at all - let me take advantage of this one to say again 'thanks!' for all the reviews people leave for TRTC and the occasional emails as well. I'm sure I've forgotten to sent replies to some of you posing questions and the like, so if you're reading this, I'm sorry about that. It definitely doesn't mean I didn't read what you went me.

To clear just a few things up, also: there's a lot of action and grim XCOM work in these next two chapters, but then it'll go back to clearing up the relationships and the like between the characters. There's usually little room for that during missions and combat, and I like to keep a sort of divide between the characters' professional selves as soldiers and their 'traditional' selves when at the base or off active duty. But keep suggesting things in reviews or emails and send me your thoughts! I may well use them!

note: I made a minor recent edit. Thanks to hwsod for pointing it out.

* * *

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. The UNETCO timetable moves ever forward, but a new complication has arisen as the alien forces in the Far East surge out in unexpected numbers and with surprising fury. India and Juliet Squads have taken the _Procyon_, a cargo ship operated by the alien enthralled Sirius Group, and uncovered the existence of a terrible chemical weapon based on Chryssalid Venom. But already the Amazon village has been made a martyr – the first field test of a weapon the Sirius Group hopes to use against the city of Singapore.

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia **

Chapter XIX

_Twilight of the Amazons (Part 1) _

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

The Skyranger wasn't as fast or smooth a ride as a Lightning; carrying with it as it did all the general discomforts of normal air travel. As a vehicle, it could actually move more cargo and soldiers than the human-built UFO, but it felt much more cramped since it was all confined to a tube rather than a circular space. The Skyranger's great saving grace, however, was that it ran on conventional fuels rather than irreplaceable Elerium 115. There was no rush to get the two squads back home to Seiran, so Command had let them take the 'flying greyhound.' 

The men and women of India and Juliet Squads sat in metal and plastic seats that folded out of the wall. The arrangement lead to a lot of back and forth jostling whenever the plane accelerated or maneuvered, though the vertical take off had been surprisingly easy going. All things taken together, it was a far cry from even flying coach on a commercial airplane, but then the Skyranger was of Russian design; rugged and reliable, but not exactly comfortable.

Shampoo sighed, looking around her. The two squad leaders sat opposite to one another with their helmets on, conferencing with Command and Control back at Seiran. She couldn't hear what was going on, but it had to be important, and probably had something to do with their change in heading. She didn't like being kept out of the proverbial loop, but she understood the meaning of seniority and rank, and the _privileges_ it enjoyed.

'It must be nice being a Squad Leader,' she thought, watching the two boys. Maybe, if Ranma and Ryouga had ended up on the same team somehow, she would have been given the rank of Special Lieutenant. She wouldn't have much minded having a good follower like Konatsu on her team, and though Mousse was annoying, she could count on him doing what she said without question. Identifying a third team mate was a bit harder: Ukyou was out by default, and Ryu seemed too… strong willed and independent minded. All that left was Kuno.

Said kendoist looked up from opening a small plastic package, somehow sensing that she was looking in his direction. Smiling in that stupid, typically _outsider_ _male_ way of his, Kuno held up another little yellow box identical to the one he was ripping open.

"Calorie Mate?" he asked, offering her one of the mini-rations.

She was tempted to brush him off (he was the weakest of them all in her opinion, with an addle-minded personality only a mother could love) but instead she put up a polite smile of her own and accepted. Her great grandmother had always drilled into her not to look a gift horse in the mouth, and she never had. Or as the Amazon saying went: "opportunities are for seizing." If Kuno wanted to part with some of the few rations they'd each been allocated pre-mission, then she would be happy to oblige his geniality.

Ripping open the package and folding it back, she took a bite and silently savored the jolt of chocolate flavor that almost brought a smile to her lips. It was typical of Japanese food, as she saw it: stiff, utilitarian and unsophisticatedly bland, but pretty convenient. She couldn't think of anything suitably Chinese that she'd rather have eaten and that could have been stuffed into a water-tight pouch all day.

Chewing, she looked around again, checking on everyone else crammed into the bumpy sardine can that was their ride. Konatsu was trying to sleep, despite being in what couldn't have been a comfortable position trying to keep his head propped upright. Ukyou was also either asleep or dozing, taking advantage of the ninja boy by resting her head on his shoulder and propping her stupidly big spatula weapon against the floor and the wall to keep her body from slipping. She was probably drooling all over him, too, but predictably Konatsu just seemed happy to be her compliant male pillow.

Without meaning to or wanting to, she briefly thought about how she could have used Mousse in the same role, but she didn't want to give the clueless fool any ideas. Besides, he and Ryu were looking at some magazine or manga or something, and being downright secretive about it, too. Mousse had to have smuggled it in, and knowing the male mind as she did, Shampoo could guess it was probably pornographic or something. Then again, given the boys she ended up surrounded by, maybe it was a magazine about martial arts or the "_Top 10 Ways To Kill A Man With Your Feet_."

And if it was that kind of magazine… they had to know she would want to read it too!

Shampoo shifted in her seat, trying to get a look at the cover.

"Shampoo!" Ranma's voice immediately retrieved her attention from its desperate search for distraction. But then, to her disappointment, her _airen_ turned to address Mousse.

"Mousse," he added. "Put on your helmets. We want your input."

Shampoo let herself smile; even if Mousse had to tag along, it was nice to be recognized and singled out for attention. Maybe the Commander herself had asked for her! She quickly reached under her seat and picked up her helmet. Without giving it a second thought, she toggled it out of the "power saving" sleep mode and slipped it over her head. At first, she'd disliked having the helmet in the way since she'd never trained with anything like it before as an Amazon warrior, but she was starting to really… appreciate it, and not just for the extra protection. It was an important link between her and her friends and comrades in arms (such as they were).

An XCOM trooper without it was truly alone against the hostile unknown.

She quickly switched the HUD to a communications-only mode, using practiced eye movements and blinks. It didn't take long to upload the encryption protocol and communications frequency from Ranma, and join the conversation he was a part of. In the interests of clarity, it was audio-only, though Shampoo knew teleconferences were common within the UNETCO community.

"They're both here," she heard Ryouga say.

"Audio is fine," Mousse confirmed. "I'm good."

"I am also," Shampoo spoke up, feeling the sudden need to make herself heard.

Commander Yasuda got right to the point, asking, "Do either of you two recognize this voice?"

A second later, Shampoo heard a recording. The sound was rather poor, as faint static threatened to drown out the rapid-fire Chinese that was being spoken. It quickly became clear that it was a phone call, with the first desperate sounding speaker trying to exchange words with a calmly toned (somewhat bored sounding even) emergency operator. The latter kept insisting on details, while the former seemed to be preoccupied running and yelling about being under attack.

One phrase stuck out, though: "Amazon Women."

And the voice, Shampoo recognized it quickly as well.

"I… I think that's Lin Ke. Or maybe Pin Ke," she answered, not for the first time glad that she could converse perfectly in English, instead of embarrassing herself by muddling through insufferable Japanese. Pink and Link were twins, old enemies of hers from a neighboring village called Yaocaicun. They weren't great fighters, but instead practiced a rather unique form of herbalism, horticulture and 'traditional' medicine. She couldn't help but wonder just what this was all about. Were the Amazons raiding the twins' village?

"See?" Ranma spoke up, with an audible huff. "I couldn't understand a word of what she was sayin,' but I remembered that voice and how she talked."

"Is this related to the attack?" Ryouga asked, posing the question for any present to speculate on. "Would the Amazons attack nearby villages?"

Shampoo, for the first time in a long time, felt a bit of shame at what she had to admit to regarding her people. As Outsiders, they wouldn't understand, and would think less of the Amazons for their own ignorance. But before she could frame the response… delicately and diplomatically, Mousse blurted out a reply.

"They would," he said, sounding neither reproving nor approving. "The Amazon Village exacts tribute from nearby towns in return for protection from bandits and the like. The region is still pretty lawless and corrupt, so to most, Amazon 'justice' is better than none at all."

"The Tribe protects weaker villages!" Shampoo tried to hastily correct her male associate. The way he put, it sounded downright criminal. "Amazons are warriors! We protect, and as a show of respect, other villages shower us with gifts of appreciation. It is the honor of every Amazon warrior to…"

"Then this could be an isolated incident," Commander Yasuda interrupted, her tone of voice icy but totally professional.

"I doubt it, Commander," another voice, one Shampoo didn't recognize, replied. She looked up at the comm. menu, and saw the name that was highlighted, indicating who was speaking at the moment (or whose microphone was active). It was someone with the last name 'Weissman.'

"At least three other emergency calls were made within twenty kilometers of that one," the man continued. "Two were from cell phones, one from a land line. Our data mining indicates a power failure occurred that disconnected the landline at the same time the sole operational cell phone call abruptly terminated. I do not believe this level of electronic warfare can be attributed to overt operations by some… martial arts villagers."

Again, Shampoo felt she had to rise to the defense of her people, though ironically it was to confirm their possible actions. "Amazon Women are not to be… Do not underestimate the women of the Amazon Tribe. We are not a backward people. Do not assume that we wouldn't know, first, to deprive an enemy of his senses. The first thing we would do is blind him, and cut off his ability to cry for help."

"That's true," Mousse chimed in. "But while it wouldn't be hard to destroy a generator or power lines, I don't know any Amazon Special Techniques that could jam a cell phone call."

Shampoo bit back a retort, her microphone activating only to catch an angry hiss.

"And there's nothing on radar?" Ranma asked.

"We are reliant on the rather un-impressive Chinese air defense network in that region," Weissman answered the Special Lieutenant's question. "But we haven't detected anything, and Hyperwave Detection isn't possible that low to the ground and that far away."

"That doesn't prove… or disprove… anything," Ryouga grumbled.

"The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," Yasuda quoted. "Though I think Carl Sagan would find the saying ironic in our case. This could be a local flare up, or it could be a landing, or it could be one of these 'Venom' bombs. Or it could be worse: a bombing followed up by a landing."

"We'd be happy to check it out, either way," Ryouga volunteered. "Since we are already in the air."

"Agreed," Ranma said with a hint of rivalry. "Juliet Squad's always up for a fight. Plus, if it is just a buncha' Amazons, we might be able to talk 'em down."

"Yes, we all know talk is your strong point," Mousse quipped, but hastily added. "Sir."

"Weissman?" Yasuda prompted.

"The timing concerns me, Commander. It seems… suspicious. We should have a keyhole over the area in twelve minutes."

His suspicious seemed to be shared with the Regional Commander. When she spoke, it was obvious that she had made up her mind, and that she was convinced that their alien friends had their invisible hand in this particular cookie jar.

"Saotome. Hibiki," she said the two names with the sort of sharp bark that came from years of command. "Continue on course and keep in contact. I'll have backup ready to scramble if IMINT comes back with a hostile picture of the area."

"Looks like we're talking a little detour after all," Ranma mirthfully joked about their being sent into yet another (possible) combat situation. "Shampoo. Mousse. You have ten minutes to fill us in on what we could face and what approaches you would suggest if we face hostile Amazons on touchdown."

"Yes, sir!" both echoed.

Which silently came as something of a surprise to Shampoo. For a moment there, she hadn't even thought about what it would mean – for her personally – to have to fight her own people. To conspire with others to act in what could be counter to the interests and ways of the Amazon Village. Yet at the same time, despite everything, she couldn't… wouldn't… turn her back on Ranma, or anyone else in UNETCO or the two squads, as annoying as they could sometimes be.

'The Elders wouldn't attack any of the other villages unless things had gone terribly wrong. Had word about the loss of Cologne caused a schism? Were the neighboring villages trying to break out from beneath the Amazon's protective umbrella?' The village was too large, now, to autonomously feed itself, and it had very little to actually trade with. 'If we land, will I really have to fight my own people? Can't we just leave when it's clear that there aren't any aliens around?' Those thoughts raced through her mind, along with one more.

One last terrible thought: 'What if that weapon… that weapon we were sent to stop… what if it had already been used?'

What if there WAS no Amazon Village left when they landed?

She couldn't even imagine it. The Amazons had survived for three thousand years! Their ancient ways were the right ways, the best ways, that any human society had ever managed to craft for themselves. They were strong. Stronger than Outsiders! They couldn't… just couldn't… disappear in a single lonely night.

* * *

Commander Zraz didn't like having Entertainment Modules on his ship. 

Gliding past the Stimulation Chamber, he chanced a look inside, and saw several of his own men enjoying themselves; lighter shapes among the dark and swaying Chryssalids, all drinking in the sensation. Zraz didn't like it. The Modules were a Sectoid indulgence, and they drove soldiers from their posts and their weapons. Zraz himself had never used one of the psionic machines, and if he died on this mission, he would not regret his decision.

He had no problem with the Chryssalids using the Modules, of course, since the alternative was to have them milling around unpacified or causing trouble, but his soldiers would be better served by double checking their gear or getting ready for any potential flare ups during the mission window. He was tempted to have Engineering turn the damn things off, or to prohibit their use by non-Chryssalids during the mission, but he had been in Command long enough to know better. The Modules were good for the morale of his men and helped to relieve tension between those who were not members of the same Hatching.

He continued on his way, trying to get a feel for the crew compliment of the vessel. He saw one of the Sectoids they had on board; the creature shuffled past without any outward show of respect or emotion, and Zraz could see his reflection in its glossy black eyes. He had felt a small mental nudge, though, which served as the Sectoid's common means of interaction with non-psionic species. Truth be told, it was not comforting, and it left Zraz feeling momentarily numb and cold.

Sectoids, in his opinion, were far worse than Ethereals in that respect. The little clones had some kind of hive mind beyond The Mind that guided them all from its cradle in Cydonia. They also smelt bad, like their meat was rotten from the inside out. He also couldn't shake that silently condescending nature they had towards any race that wasn't psi-capable. The little medic Sectoid would have done well to remember that, within the greater hierarchy, this battleship was Zraz's to command.

Rising up the central lift, he slithered slowly towards the Command Center, tucked safely within the most heavily protected section of the ship. Usually, only a navigator and an overseer needed to be left to guide the ship, but this time all the high ranked officers were gathered and in attendance. The ship was more crowded than standard procedure dictated, and there were five leaders present rather than the normal three.

Alien Battleships, like the one Zraz enjoyed command of, were extremely versatile vessels, second only to Large Scouts, and only then because (at least until recently) there was usually little need to project so much force at a single time. Standard full compliment for a Battleship was twelve soldiers, two navigators (a primary and a 'threat observer' or gunner), two engineers, two medics, three leaders, the commander, and at least six terrorist units. The maximum a Battleship could carry, however, was more than three times that.

Only once, to Zraz's knowledge, had a Battleship ever needed to carry a 'maximum compliment.' It had been for an assault on one of the human bases, using a Muton crew. He did not need to imagine what the assault had been like. The Mind Knew. The Mind had seen it all, and through The Mind, Zraz had seen and experienced it himself: the slaughter, the massacre, the terror in the eyes of the defeated as they fired with their tiny personal weapons, knowing it was futile. Mutons were good at that sort of thing.

Zraz did not envy the price they paid, however. No: not at all.

As the metal door to the room flowed back into place, sealing and becoming part of the wall, a tall titian form loomed in the back of the room, facing one of the flickering displays that were part of that same dynamic surface. Zraz paused; so long as _that one_ was in attendance, he was Commander in name only. Ethereals were in a hierarchy all their own, closer to The Mind than he would or could ever be. There were no medics or engineers or navigators among the Ethereal race – only soldiers, leaders and commanders.

As the Ethereal Leader turned, Zraz could see a dark ragged pattern that ran down the side of its face. Part of the skin around the jaw on that side seemed to have dried and drawn back; leaving a permanent sneer over craggy mismatched teeth. This was one of Hollow Eyes' subordinates, here to supervise the Sectoids and one of their 'pet projects.' Sneer's mind erupted without warning, seizing the thoughts of all present, sparing only the busy navigator from its uncompromising command.

SPEAK

The mental oppression ebbed, just a little, receding enough to allow a measure of independence. Zraz hissed out the low pitched Snakeman equivalent of a sigh. He had worked under Ethereals and known the power of their psionics since he had torn his way free from his leathery egg. There was something both terrifying and comforting about their undeniable power.

"What is the status of our stealth?" Zraz began, and all five of the Snakeman Leaders present turned to the dynamic display systems that floated in midair or just above the surface of the wall. They were all from the same Nesting Company, and all but two from the same crèche. One was from Zraz's own brood. They were Kin, and he was glad to have them by his side, especially against the humans. Years ago, they had been somewhat contemptible creatures, but their "XCOM" organization had changed that view among many Snakemen. It wasn't just their use of alien technology, but their growing psionic powers, that demanded respect.

"We have not been spotted," Zrell responded, sounding pleased. Like most Snakemen, he valued guile and cunning. Zraz had many spawn, but only Zrell and Zren had risen to the rank of Leader. Zren had died a short time ago, which was a shame, as he had shown much promise and could have risen to Commander some day. Commanders were entitled to spawn twenty percent of a Nesting Company crèche, whereas Leaders were only given a paltry five percent.

"Their local detection systems are primitive and easily fooled," another Leader, Crax, released a long low growl. "The natives are isolated. We may have as much as one fifth of a revolution of this world before we are disturbed."

"That would be well," another added, leaving unsaid, 'If it remains true.'

The human XCOM organization had craftily developed a means of intercepting alien communications through the use of a hugely scaled up Mind Probe, larger and more powerful than even the ship-mounted ones used in Battleships. Once they detected a possible UFO, they scanned it (or even just the area), reading the surface thoughts of any life forms in the area. Even ships 'running silent' and not communicating actively with alien bases or Commanders were vulnerable to interception. The only defense was to not be detected in the first place.

Speaking of which…

"What does the land below resemble?" Xatix, another old Snakeman who had never progressed beyond the rank of Leader, had asked the question. He followed up with the more important: "What resistance will we face?"

The relevant information appeared overhead, queued by the Battleship's Threat Observer. The ship mounted Mind Probe quickly scanned and processed the stray thoughts of those many miles away. Their low approach vector didn't give as thorough a look at what was going on as a high altitude approach would have, but it was sufficient to get numbers and perspective.

"I have never seen to many _chrysali_ in one place," Zrell spoke with clear amazement. They were not true _chrysali_, actually, as the human hosts below had no Chryssalids growing within them. The Snakeman tongue had no word for that condition, however.

"We must not be careless," Zraz said, checking the displays. "Our control of these chrysali will be limited. Let our terror units do their work while we do ours and quickly depart…"

Ideally, the strike would be lightning fast.

Zraz knew it almost certainly wouldn't actually turn out that way. They had many objectives to see to on the ground, and unlike those who underestimated the human special organization that so plagued their on-world operations, Zraz knew better. The native humans were so much swamp scum - annoying but easily swept aside. The real threat was likely already flying in their direction.

The ship landed just as the meeting wrapped up. An alien Battleship had an in-atmosphere cruise speed over seven times the speed of sound, and the nature of the inertia-less drive meant that it only had to slow down at the last moment before landing. There was something to be said for speed as a defense as well as stealth, and it never took very long to get where they were going. The ship was slightly stealthier when moving at slower speeds, but they had already started out close to their objective location.

Hiding a ship in a lake or other body of water was an old trick, even among Star Spawn, and it remained an effective tactic. This leg of the trip was the last quick dash, after hearing news of the confirmed attack launched by the human pawns of the Ethereals. Zraz was wary, but he had a good feeling about this mission. Everything was going as planned, and they had come over-prepared.

He favored Zrell with a fierce gaze – a sign of respect. It would be a shame to lose another spawn after it had risen to the rank of Leader. Zrell returned the gesture and then slithered away to meet with his soldiers. Zraz, meanwhile, visited the upper armory and retrieved the same Blaster Launcher he had always used, along with a standard medium plasma rifle and two handfuls of grenades. If things went ideally, he would go the entire mission without using any of them.

And if things did not go ideally…

Zraz examined the perfectly smooth surface of the Blaster Bomb in his hands, seeing his face reflected in the curved alien alloy. Death was in his hands - guided, certain Death. It was a force he would not hesitate to unleash, but at the same time, he wondered… whether a human in powered armor, heading towards them, was thinking the same thing at that very moment?

'The Mind guides us; watches with us; watches through us,' Zraz thought, tiny slitted eyes shining in the darkness of the alien Battleship. 'So we will see.'

* * *

Akane ran at a brisk pace, not for the first time surprised by the physical capabilities of her team mates. None of them could keep pace with her if she went all out, but they were leaps and bounds above anyone she had ever met who wasn't already a martial artist in Ranma's league. She still wasn't totally used to keeping in step with others as she ran, despite their own impressive abilities, and she had to continually reign in the impulse to think of it as a contest and rush ahead. 

Plus, who was she kidding?

She was excited.

They were already on their way back to base when they had been contacted by Command and notified of Seiran's change of status from a Code Two (low alert) to Code Three (high alert). They had dispensation to continue their training during a Code Two alert, but a Code Three always meant an immediate report to duty stations. In effect, their recall meant one specific thing.

Action!

There was a chance she would be sent into action!


	56. The Twilight of the Amazons II

The Skyranger's engines roared as it approached the LZ or Landing Zone. It did not touch down smoothly; blasting away debris and wet chunks of grass and earth. The sky rumbled in the distance, filling the early morning with the promise of a downpour. A dark and unwelcoming atmosphere descended with it encouraging the wise to retreat indoors with a warm blanket and a good book.

The back of the Skyranger lowered, hydraulics hissing, planting itself firmly into the ground. Mousse and Konatsu were the first two out of the ship, the steady and almost imperceptible pitter patter of droplets falling onto his stealth suit providing a strange sense of detachment from the world outside. He had been cured of his _Jyusenkyou_ curse for some time now, but rain had always been an old mental catalyst, and continued to trigger a somewhat atavistic response in him.

He never wanted to change again, not like that.

Mousse briefly looked upwards, letting a few drops splatter against his suit's optics, blurring them slightly. They were coated to repel fluids, including water, and mere surface tension would not be enough to obscure his vision. Lowering his head, the water slouched off, and he took another few steps away from the landed Skyranger. The softened ground beneath his feet pooled under his weight and curled around the lip of his boot. It was the dark brown muck it had always been – easily flooded in springtime, ruining roads and carefully arranged plots of land.

'This isn't my home. This hasn't been my home in a long, long time,' he thought with undisguised bitterness. 'Shampoo would never leave it, though, would she?'

Behind him, the rest of the two squads filed out of the transport and started making a ground's eye appraisal of the area. It was mountainous country, but open as well, with un-forested valleys dominated by shrub land, bamboo fields and rice patties. The Skyranger had landed just outside the village of Yaocaicun, but rather than draw out excited, curious or skittish villagers, the response was… nothing.

"Looks like this place's seen better days," Ranma stated the obvious.

Yaocaicun undoubtedly had seen better days. There were damaged buildings that they hadn't been able to identify on their first observation pass over the area. Visibility had not been very good, unfortunately. Mousse had personally been through Yaocaicun a few times before, mostly to learn about the varied poisons the town was famous for. It was a village of terraces, built in a typically hap hazard rural fashion, sprawling along two main roads that met up in the center of town. There were no walls or towers, but the houses themselves were quite large by rural Chinese standards.

"Looks like Susan's finished her run and entered a holding pattern," Ranma said, prompting everyone to give at least a cursory glance towards their 'minimap' HUD feature. The aerial drone had compiled a rather detailed map of the area after being detached from its berth on the Skyranger, and the extent of the town's damage became clearer. Infrared showed some of the buildings were still smoldering from being set on fire, and other blobs had been identified by the computer as 'likely' biological intercepts. Most of those were among the ruins on the far side of the town.

"What's that north-northeast?" Ukyou asked, also looking at the map.

Mousse had been about to ask the same thing, but then he already suspected what it was. Shampoo or Ranma would know for sure, so he opted to wait and see if they confirmed what he had already thought.

"A poison glade," Shampoo answered her spatula wielding rival. "Mostly destroyed."

"Probably the twins. Looks sorta like they formed it just outside of town…" Ranma paused as he considered the options. "And look at the infrared. There could be a couple'a survivors hidin' in there."

"You go ahead then," Ryouga spoke up. Mousse turned in his direction, and it didn't take a genius to guess what India Squad's leader was about to suggest.

"We'll clean out the village," he finished, sounding unruffled by the task. Shouldering his weapon, the lost one called to his comrades, "Mousse, you're on point. Ryu, Kuno, form up behind me."

Ranma didn't put up an argument regarding which team would do what. Mousse knew Saotome, and knew that even now he would avoid the dirtier work if given the opportunity. Plus, Juliet Squad was better equipped to deal with survivors and get them to safety. India Squad's chief virtue and specialty was that it could and would destroy anything in their path. There was little room there for kid gloves and frightened civilians.

"Let's move out!" Ryouga barked, and they headed off towards the town, ready to sweep it clean. Mousse spared Juliet Squad and the now closed-up rear of the Skyranger with mixed feelings. Intel had confirmed the presence of a landed UFO, an alien Battleship no less, about three miles to the south outside the Amazon village. A part of him wished that they were landing near there, but Command wanted them to contain and investigate the area before reinforcements arrived to frontally assault the ship.

Mousse's eyes swept down to his shouldered rifle. It was just a regular MSG90X1, not even a laser rifle. The Skyranger had not come with any extra weapons except for the cache of emergency T-6Bs, since its mission had been to just pick them up. Those laser pistols, second generation models, had been divided up by the two squads. No doubt the lack of firepower (Shampoo's heavy laser aside) was one of the primary reasons Command wanted them on the periphery of the coming battle.

That… and they had been up all night fighting.

"I've got something on PAWS," Mousse warned, taking professional note of the movement registering on his rifle-mounted scanner. They had just set foot on the main road leading into Yaocaicun, on the outskirts of the village. There was a lot of movement around them; a lot of debris in the air, being tossed aside by the wind and battered down by the rain. The Platoon Advance Warning System was a sophisticated piece of machinery, thankfully, and it had been set to only alert them to movement above a certain size. All four members of India Squad, strung out in an open, staggered Z formation, zeroed in on the source of the moment as it came out from behind one of the houses.

It was immediately recognizable, in shape at least, as human.

It wore human clothes and had a human form, but the skin that could be seen was knotted and brownish. It shuffled around the side of the building, and as it did so a rag doll in its right hand was being dragged through the mud. It took a second or two to realize, to take in, the realization that the 'doll' it had been dragging around was the broken body of a child. The infected woman looked at the four soldiers with wild blood-shot eyes.

"By the…" Kuno started to whisper.

"You all know our ROE," Ryouga cut the kendoist off. "Identify and Execute."

In other words: 'destroy anything that appears to be under alien influence.'

Two shots rang out; sharp, loud barks, coughing twin 6.7 millimeter custom rounds, designed specifically for the XCOM MSG90X1 sniper rifle. The infected Amazon took both to the chest, sending it to the ground without as much as a grunt. Ryu and Kuno slowly lowered their weapons, fat raindrops dribbling down the sides of their rifles.

They advanced slowly, and only a few seconds later, the zombified Amazon pulled itself back up and onto its feet. The gaping bloody wound in its chest didn't seem to even cause it pain, though at least it had the courtesy to bleed. Before it could do anything else, a bullet sheared the top of its head off in a fountain of crimson and dark orange.

"Headshots if you can," Ryouga said, voice held firmly in monotone. "Conserve ammo."

As they advanced into the ruined village, they found another infected Amazon beating a dead body, hitting it over and over, long after it had ceased to be recognizable as male or female. It turned and hissed at them, beautiful female features contorted in the madness of a chemically induced haze. Mousse personally put a bullet between her eyes and considered it the most merciful act he had committed in recent memory.

They cleared out two houses, finding no one alive.

It was an unnerving experience, as two men took watch and two stormed inside. There was slightly more early-morning light here in the town than there had been at sea aboard the Procyon, but the nature of the place seemed entirely more eerie. His body and mind seemed to want to crawl into a detached routine: stand, advance, shoot, stand, advance, shoot. Around the time they finished checking out the fourth house, he heard over the group comm. that Ranma's group had encountered some resistance.

"Dogs," Ranma had explained, between punctuated bursts of gunfire. "A bunch of 'em… just came at us out of the blue."

"Wild?" Ryouga had asked, calmly.

The other squad leader paused a moment before replying, with certainty, "Infected."

Mousse's motion sensor screamed.

"Incoming!" he shouted the warning, turning just as two Amazons raced out from inside a building and down the street. Desperately, he wanted to see them with their hands up, in the universal posture of surrender, or at least giving some form of greeting. Their clothes – slipshod armor thrown over what had to be nightclothes – were stained by blood, and both brandished large muscle swords. They were fast, even for Amazons, running as fast as forty kilometers per hour, and clearly a team.

Mousse hesitated; surely infected humans wouldn't be working cooperatively…

The first stumbled forward and fell, the top half of its head missing. The other got a full twenty feet before a shot to the neck filled the air with blood. Mousse turned on his commanding officer, shocked, when he heard a guttural snarl from the woman. She was still walking towards them, even with the awful neck wound. No living thing could stand upright; even continue to shamble forward, with a gaping wound where its jugular used to be. This close, he could see her skin was only slightly off-color.

Another shot, and it was over.

Mousse turned to the Ryouga; he had to ask. "How? How did you know?"

Ryouga's face, shrouded behind the visor and helmet of his stealth suit, was unreadable. He gestured to Ryu and Kuno, who had just finished checking the house nearby.

"My instincts told me…" the lost one explained, simply.

"Mayhap we would be wisest to simply destroy this entire cursed place," Kuno remarked, following behind Ryu as they headed to the next building. Mousse wouldn't say so, but he was starting to feel the same way.

"That isn't why we're here," Ryouga replied, shaking his head. "We have to hope that someone is alive and praying for help. Our two squads… we didn't fly out here to kill people; we came to save them. Even if there's only one out of a whole village, we came here to save them."

Mousse stared at the lost boy, a little surprised by his words. That was technically why they were here, but he hadn't thought Ryouga would take the mission to heart like it sounded he did. Maybe it was just that, in as much a he advocated hunting down the enemy and annihilating him, the leader of India Squad still wanted some more noble purpose to follow. Maybe he wanted to think he was saving someone against all odds because he couldn't save Akari? Or maybe he just wanted to say the sort of thing Command would approve of.

Regardless, three doors later and there was still nothing to show for it.

Ryu and Kuno had just exited, shaking their heads, when Juliet Squad radioed in a warning. Konatsu, scouting ahead of his group using his multi-body technique, had detected a very large amount of movement headed in their direction. India Squad quickly dispersed and took up firing positions behind cover.

Two minutes passed, but nothing came into sight.

"We're being watched," Ryu broke the uneasy silence. "I can feel it."

"You are merely nervous," Kuno chortled confidently. "Fear not! Take heart in the blade of Tatewaki Kuno, your generous, humble and stalwart comrade in arms!"

"Humble, yeah r…"

"The ground," Ryouga suddenly said, as if realizing something. "Is this…?"

Mousse felt it, then – the ground had begun to sink and pull him down. It was as if a sinkhole was opening itself under his feet. Any normal man would have been dragged under before he even realized it, but Mousse was no ordinary man. His left foot found a tiny purchase in the crumbling, slippery earth, and it was enough for him to jump. He turned as he angled towards one of the thatched roofs nearby, and he could see Ryu doing the same. Kuno, being slower and with a less well developed _sakkijutsu_, was almost halfway under. Only the use of his sword and rifle as anchors kept him from being pulled down completely.

Ryouga was gone.

Acting almost without thinking, Mousse snared Kuno with a line of weighted chain and started to drag him out. It was harder than he had expected; there was some force pulling the kendoist down even as he struggled. Then Ryu cursed, and Mousse could hear him firing. Turning away from Kuno, just for a moment, Mousse saw the problem: a whole damn swarm of armed and armored Amazons were charging towards them. At the speed the faster ones were capable of, they'd almost be in melee range in less than ten or fifteen seconds. Cursing loudly, he finally pulled Kuno free and the swordsman landed on his feet on the same roof, just a few feet away.

"There a problem over there?" Ranma yelled over the comm., hearing every word they said.

"We'll handle it," Mousse spoke for the squad, and faced the oncoming Amazons he had been taught for half his life to serve and respect above all others. Heaven help him, but he recognized some of the faces in that crowd. He heard Ryu curse again as his MSG90 finally ran out of ammo.

The Hidden Weapons Master snapped his rifle over his shoulder with a smooth motion and tucked his hands into his sleeves. It was raining hard, now, the thunder and lightning of the storm growing ever closer. Widening his stance, he withdrew his hands, now sporting a black and silver gauntlet over each one. Mounted into the back of the hand, on each gauntlet, were a pair of protruding exotic alloy tubes.

"Kuro Hakuchouken," he whispered, meeting the fray headlong. "Fist of the Black Swan!"

* * *

Ranma tried not to dwell on the battle unfolding on the other side of the village. Ryouga had volunteered to be the spear point of their little side trip and soak up the enemy's attention, and as much at is annoyed him to admit it, Ranma knew India Squad was better suited for it than his own fire team. Besides, he had the feeling his group was in for a fight of their own before this was anywhere near over.

"There is a lot of fire damage," Shampoo observed as they carefully walked around a burned down farmhouse. "This building burned down very fast. Very hot."

"Incendiaries?" Ukyou asked. She and Konatsu were scouting ahead and away from the town, watching for an ambush.

"No," Shampoo answered, kneeling down next to a charred looking brick. "Amazon Tribe does not use anything like that. This was one of the Dragon Breath techniques."

"Techniques?" Ranma asked, stressing the plural. In his ear, he could still hear India Squad fighting, but as Squad Leader he had ordered the rest of his squad out of that comm. frequency. It would only be a distraction at the moment. This talk about techniques had piqued his natural curiosity however. He couldn't recall any fire-creating Amazon techniques.

"Like Saffron," Shampoo clarified, looking around before continuing on their way. "Convert _ki_ into fire."

"Pyrokinetics," Konatsu supplied the technical term.

"How many Amazons know this technique?" Ranma asked, secretly hoping he would get the chance to see it in action, even if it was dangerous. He'd been experimenting with elemental based _ki _conversion for some time, but he was always at his best when he could observe a technique and then copy and customize it. There were some, like a certain lost boy, who thought of this as stealing techniques, but they were just jealous and looking at it the wrong way. It was just a little training short cut, and who didn't like to save time if it could be helped?

"…Two, I think," Shampoo replied. "Maybe three. The most powerful is Elder Sin Ku. She is very strong; she has a lot of ki. What I no understand…" she quickly corrected herself. "What I do not understand is why anyone would attack this place. Why not stay in the village?"

"If I had to guess," Ranma did just that. "I'd say they were chasing those who survived the attack on the Amazon village. Either that, or the aliens are controlling them remotely."

"That would be most unfortunate for us, Saotome-taichou," Konatsu sounded like that last option was the worst thing he had heard all day. "We are not well armed enough to take on alien troops, especially if they are expecting us."

"We'll cross that river when and if we come to it," Ranma assured him. "Let's just stay focused."

Finally, they could clearly see the ruined tangle of vines that had been Pink and Link's preferred battleground. It was smaller than the one Ranma remembered fighting in back when they had visited Nerima, and large swaths of it were laid to waste. The fire damage was obvious, though the recent rainfall had left about half of it intact. Prickly vines as thick as trees remained, twisting and coiling around each other in a poisonous labyrinth. Many of the flower heads, however, had been cut or torn away.

"Motion!" Ukyou warned. As they got closer, sure enough, he could see one of the infected Amazons trapped among several massive creeper vines. They were wrapped around her like snakes, and their wicked hooked spines were impaling her from a dozen angles. For a moment, she looked _alive_.

Then, even closer, they could see the mottled flesh and the glazed eyes.

"I know this one," Shampoo answered the question before he had the chance to ask. She sounded pained, but no where near grief stricken. She approached the infected girl, unafraid of the thrashing form.

"Mei Ru," Shampoo said coldly, looking the girl in the eyes.

Without warning, she struck with one of her combat knives. It was a surprisingly clean cut, perhaps due to the blood the body had already lost. Shampoo reached out and caught the head before it could fall to the ground, cradling it carefully and with as much respect as she could manage, despite the grizzly situation. Gently resting the head on the ground and closing the eyes, Shampoo slowly shook her head.

The rest of Juliet Squad stood by, unsure what to say.

"Shampoo…" Ranma said, after a few moments.

The Chinese Amazon nodded. "We find those who did this… we find them and kill them…" She looked back at him, and he could imagine the hard and desperate look on her face. "Right? Lieutenant?"

Ranma frowned behind his helmet.

"Yeah," he replied, knowing it was what she needed to hear, and how he would feel in her place. _Like Ryouga_, he suspected. "And we'll save those we can. That, too, Shampoo."

She stared at him for a long second, soaking that part in, and perhaps feeling a little bad that she had forgotten all about it. Then she nodded, and they headed deeper into the forest of vines. If there was anyone alive in there, anyone they could save instead of just put out of their misery, Juliet Squad would find them.

* * *

These sure as Hell weren't like the zombies in the movies.

For that matter, they weren't like the ones they'd been told about in the training videos. Chryssalid victims were described as animalistic and savage, without higher reasoning, and most importantly: unable to operate cooperatively. Maybe it was because these ones didn't have an alien parasite growing inside them; maybe it was because they were all Amazons and martial artists of the highest caliber. Mousse didn't know, couldn't speculate – all he could do was fight.

His foot skated along the ground, disrupting the horse stance of the crazed woman warrior in front of him. She had been a brutish hulk of a human being before getting a lethal dose of the alien toxin called Venom; now she was a true monster. Most Amazons were not the beautiful feminine ideal like Shampoo – far from it. Given the scars on this little lady's face, Mousse could guess why she was giving him so much more trouble than the others.

'Breaking point training,' he could see it in the way she moved, if not the way she looked. Luckily, she was a relative novice, but the training itself had made her tough. It was a damn good thing he had come prepared with his Fist of the Black Swan.

With her stance broken and her defense open, he crouched and shot his fist up and into her gut. The impact alone would have normally broken a quarter of the ribs on a human being, the shockwave stunning the heart and killing the victim within seconds. Mousse was no Ryu or Ryouga, but he was without exaggeration one of the most physically powerful people on the planet. The pressure of the blow also triggered the stress-sensitive switch within the palm of his gauntlet.

With a thunderous roar, his fist became momentarily engulfed in flash and flame.

"What size round did ya want?" Hans Fischbach, Senior Fabrication Technician – Seiran Mountain Division, had asked just that back when Mousse had asked for his help designing the Fist of the Black Swan. Mousse had repeated himself. The man's response: a curt, "Damn, son! You crazy or something?" spoke for itself.

The Fist was designed to punch through the nearly invincible organic armor of a Muton. The Breaking Point heartened hide of the Amazon now on the receiving end of it wasn't close to a match. A four gauge, 23mm "_Barrikada_" cartridge had just been fired directly into her torso with enough force to crumple a car engine from a hundred meters away. Venom-hardened skin tore like wet tissue paper under the combined assault; super hard bone splintered; and a wave of blood erupted like a geyser from her back.

But he wasn't done yet.

It would already have been overkill for any human opponent, but he had quickly learned that a Venom infected individual could survive simply insane amounts of trauma. Compared to a baseline human, a Chryssalid-infected host could survive several times as much physical damage and remain mobile, they could not be subdued or stunned by psionic, chemical or electrical means. Armor piercing weaponry, lasers, even plasma, all were measurably less effective. Aside from headshots, only incendiaries or overkill could do the job.

Standing, he swept aside the arm he had just struck with, pivoted and struck with a quick uppercut using his left hand. Unlike the mounting on his right arm, which held round after round of solid 23mm slugs, his left made good use of the Russian KS-23's "_Shrapnel-25_" buckshot rounds. The infected Amazon's pug-like face simply disappeared, gibed beyond recognition or recovery.

Mousse spun, an axe kick catching another infected Amazon across the face as she moved in with dual curved swords. She was a Master with them, and had no doubt practiced with the blades from the moment she could walk. Behind him, another Amazon wielded a massive _pudao_, and he didn't doubt that she had the skill and strength to split a man in two with it if she got the chance. They were working together, but he was still their better.

Ducking, dodging, and then blocking the first one's swords, he stabbed her with his elbow before pulling it across her chest. It caught for a half second, and then he was through – a long wickedly curved scythe arching out from where it was attached over his elbow. A tiny motion of his wrist retracted it again back into its hiding place, even as he landed a quick left jab to the junction of the woman's chest and right arm. This one had no Breaking Point training, not even Iron Body training, and the 4-gauge buckshot took her arm clean off, along with most of her face and upper body.

The woman with the poleaxe simply knocked aside the still standing body of her dead comrade and lunged at him. He allowed her two lunges before, seeing her drawing the weapon back, he struck. While dodging, he had started to wrap the head of her weapon with the trailing cloth of his robe. Normal fabric would have been ripped away under the Amazon's brute strength, but his robes would not tear so easily. A weave of exotic alloy fibers within the cloth gave it tensile strength great enough to make layered spider silk seem like rice paper by comparison.

He pulled sharply and the Amazon's weapon tore from her hands, ripping the insides of her palms. A slug to the center of her exposed chest put a hole in her large enough to watch TV through. It wasn't a head shot, but it severed the spinal cord, and that was good enough. He kicked the body away and tucked his hands into his sleeves. With deft fingers he reloaded the gauntlets that extended all down his arms and with a satisfying 'cha-chunk!' the four talons of the _Kuro Hakuchouken _were back in place and ready to strike.

He looked around, checking the status of the others. Kuno was on the defensive, back on the roof, sword flashing as he cut through the rain. There were three Amazons surrounding him, all looking wounded and all wielding sliced up weapons. Ryu, at Mousse's other side, was a blur of strikes and slashing spins. His hands may as well have been blades themselves, as he carved opponents apart with his _Dokuja Tanketsu Sho_ and _Geimon Tetsu Sen Shi_ techniques. The only unknown was their squad leader.

Mousse wondered if he was dead, or just lost.

The ground beneath his feet cracked, and instinctively Mousse jumped away. His gut feeling had been prophetic; only a second later, the ground cracked apart like the surface of a broken mirror, and exploded upwards. Two nearby buildings along either side of the road were leveled, one by the explosion itself, another by the shockwave rippling through the ground. One of those happened to be the building Kuno had been dueling on.

Bouncing off the ground and vaulting through the air, Mousse headed towards the rubble to check on his team mate. As he did, he saw two figures standing in the center of the crater in the middle of the street. He recognized both, and when he did, he realized who had been watching them before, and who had called down the horde they were currently chipping away at.

'Elder Pi Lu? Shit!' he cursed, in no way eager to get involved in that fight.

Compared to Ryouga, Pi Lu was a frail husk of a human being. She wasn't the shrunken troll Cologne had been, but the lost boy still easily towered over her. Pi Lu wore no normal armor or ornamentation, keeping her long white hair up in an unremarkable ponytail, and wearing a loose (very outsider Chinese and _male_, in Mousse's opinion) shirt and pants. Running down her arms and legs, however, were what appeared to be bracers of solid iron and stone.

"Ryouga!" he quickly spoke, remembering Pi Lu couldn't possibly hear him over the squad comm. "You ok?"

"She knows the Breaking Point," Ryouga replied, starting to circle the Amazon Elder. She did the same, craggy fingers flexing and unflexing.

Mousse landed in the ruins of the home, found Kuno's hand sticking out of a pile of rubble, and helped the kendoist up. He was wary of another attack, but couldn't pull his primary attention from the confrontation in the center of the street.

"That's Elder Pi Lu," he said, and wondered briefly how best to get across the kind of opponent Ryouga was facing. "She's one of Khu Lon's old rivals on the Council."

For a moment, the lost boy said nothing.

Then: "One of Granny's friends' huh?"

"Of the five elements which the Amazons train in, Pi Lu is known for what we would call terrakinetics," Mousse quickly added. "I doubt she'll use anything else."

Ryouga muttered something unintelligible, but followed up by noting, "Clear out the rest and snipe her if I haven't won by then."

"You sure?" Mousse asked. It wasn't like Ranma or Ryouga to willingly cut short or 'cheat' a duel, especially against a strong opponent.

"I'd rather complete our mission than draw out a duel," he replied, with a snort. "We're not here to prove ourselves. We're here to win and go home."

Mousse mentally went over the weapons he had on him. It wasn't honorable, and it wasn't noble, but it was doable… once the crowds thinned a bit and there was less chance of getting mobbed. Kuno's sword cut through the air, intercepting a barrage of throwing knives behind him. Tearing his eyes away from the confrontation, Mousse went back to his grim work. But with how many women warriors there seemed to be around and infected, he was starting to wonder if there were would be any Amazons beyond himself and Shampoo come morning.

And just where were all the Amazon men?


	57. The Twilight of the Amazons III

Closer to the source of the clustered infrared radiation Susan had detected, it started to become clear to Ranma just what had transpired. Amid the twisted glade of poison creepers and barbed vines Juliet Squad encountered both broken bodies, inevitably those of the townspeople, and the occasionally lost or incapacitated forms of infected Amazons. Just like he remembered from his own fight against Pink and Link, the air was thick to choking with hostile spores and aggressive toxins, but while these would have formed normally effective defenses against angry warrior women with no NBC or Hazmat gear, they seemed totally ineffective against those already suffering under the effects of the Chryssalid Venom.

The infected humans simply stumbled or ran right through gusts of poison that made their skin burn and eyes blind. They didn't feel irritation, inflammation, panic or pain. Some were bleeding from the nose and mouth; a sure sign that poisons had gotten into their lungs and done terrible damage. Inevitably, upon sensing or stumbling upon the four members of Juliet Squad, they would screech and attack. One had a rifle, to Ranma's surprise, and she had almost been able to get off a shot before Konatsu had beaten her to the trigger.

Another menace came in the form of constrictor vines laced with stinging thorns that formed a tangled mat underfoot. They were tough and strong, and somehow tried to wind around anything that dared try and trample them. Many infected Amazons showed damage around their feet from tearing themselves free, and a few others had been completely engulfed, like a small tree becoming smothered and entombed by ivy. It was this macabre feature above all others that filled Ranma with an apprehension he hadn't known during his battle through the glade in Nerima.

But they were getting closer.

He checked his rifle and noted that he was down to his last three rounds. Shouldering it and locking it into place against his back, he reluctantly retrieved his T6B ALUS or 'Advanced Laser Sidearm.' Lasers lost some effectiveness in the rain, so he also had a US SOCOM at his other hip, just in case. Leading the group, he stepped over a still twitching corpse covered in mandragora roots. Ranma remembered his own experience with the paralyzing roots, but this particular victim of them had been up and about when she'd tried to attack Juliet Squad.

If even the mandragora had proven ineffective, then it was clear that Pink and Link's offensive poisons had been completely useless when their village had been attacked. The question now was how many villagers had they been able to herd through the poison glade in their effort to buy time? As Juliet Squad came to a large, solid wall of twisted wood and bamboo, Ranma allowed himself to hope that it was a good number: maybe fifty or even a hundred.

"Looks pretty solid," Ukyou commented, walking up to the surface and rapping the back of her hand against it. "Feels solid, too."

"I'll look for a way over. One moment, please." Konatsu turned around, and jumped. Ranma would have done it himself, but Konatsu was just as nimble as he was when it came to moving around quickly, and in seconds he had scrambled up the surface of a gnarled tree, part large blooming poison flowers. After that, he vanished behind a screen of creeper leaves.

The rest of the squad waited below, backs to each other and weapons trained on any possible avenues of attack. The place was creepy, off upping to say the least, and they were all visibly on edge. Even when assaulting a UFO, at least the terrain itself wasn't actively trying to kill you. A rustle amid a cluster of thick leaves instantly drew his attention and his aim… but a closer examination revealed a long hairless tail.

'Just a rat, then?' Ranma lowered his aim a fraction, as the tail slowly disappeared into the leaves. A second later a bulbous plant head, like that of a giant Venus fly trap, also emerged, the last inch of the tail hanging out the side of its mouth.

"Saotome-taichou!" Konatsu radioed in, "It seems to be entirely sealed. There is no way in from above."

"Alright," Ranma said, turning away from the carnivorous plant and motioning to Ukyou. "We're breaching it then. Ukyou. M112."

"Gotcha!" Ukyou replied and took a few steps back, past where he stood. When it was clear that her six was being covered, she put away her rifle and fished out a small explosive charge from one of the sealed pockets on her stealth suit's combat vest. Taking a look at the wall, she quickly molded the M112's composition C4 into a half semi-circle large enough to step through without hunching. She only had a little over a pound's worth of explosive to use, so she wasn't surprised to hear Konatsu dropping down from above (with a warning that he was about to do so) just before she finished.

"Set!" She announced, and backed away from the wall, holding the M112's Command Detonator. "Three, Two, One!"

The C4 explosive burned hotly for an instant, projecting an unseen jet of fire into the strange wall. Whatever wood or bizarre plant matter it was constructed of proved incapable of resisting the charge, and when Ranma approached and landed a solid side kick to the center of the semi-circle, the whole thing fell back and in, like a hole being punched in a pumpkin.

Ranma motioned for them Ukyou and Konatsu to stand guard while he and Shampoo went in. Inside was dark save for a small, obviously artificial, light source near the center of the dome. Ranma deactivated the sound suppressors in his helmet as he approached, laser pistol at the ready.

"Anyone there?" he asked, craning his head. Yes: he could see shapes by the light. "We're not here to hurt you; we're here to help. Do you speak English or Japanese?"

Before Shampoo could add that she also spoke Chinese, one of the figures by the light picked it up – it had been a simple flashlight – and shone it in their direction. Her hand was shaking, unsteady, as the flashlight's cone of illumination moved from them over to a few bodies on the floor nearby. There were only a few plants, small ones, scattered around, along with an herbalist's mixing bowl.

"They hurt," the one holding the flashlight said, desperation creeping into her less than perfect Japanese. "I try help them, but… but…"

Ranma lowered his weapon, and he motioned for Shampoo to do the same. This close, he could see the girl with the flashlight clearly enough. It was Lin Ke (or Pin Ke – they were identical twins after all), but she looked different from exactly as he remembered back when she had visited Nerima to get revenge on Shampoo. Her face was dirty, and she was clearly nursing a black eye and a cut along the side of her chin was caked with blood. Her black hair was an unkempt mess and her clothes were filthy. She was without the earrings, hair flowers, and lower torso armor he remembered. By the look on her face and her swollen, blood shot eyes, she had probably been crying up until he'd announced that they were here to help her, and not kill everyone present.

He looked past the poor girl at the others on the floor: women mostly, eleven of them in all. Ranma's heart sank for a moment – was that all? Eleven people out of a whole village? Four of them were children, too, but they all seemed incapacitated to some degree. It was probably due to their trek through the glade; it would be terribly dangerous for normal people, even with Pink and Link helping them to get through. He also recognized one of the unconscious girls nearby as the other member of the herbalist duo. She looked to have lost a lot of blood and suffered a bad stab wound.

"This is bad…" he said, slowly. "Ukyou, I'm going to need Konatsu in here for a little while. Give him your spare medkit, too. I'll be out in a minute."

He was about to address Shampoo, when he saw Link looking up at him with wide eyes.

"Ranma?" she asked, struggling to process his being here, much less his being here wearing strange camouflage and armor and wielding distinctly un-characteristic weapons for a martial artist. She had obviously picked up on his tone of voice and maybe even recognized some of the names as martial artists from Nerima.

There was no point hiding who he was; in fact, it could help the situation.

"Yeah," he replied in Japanese, and pointed over to his companion. "And that's Shampoo."

Link frowned, but nodded compliantly. "Can you really help?"

"We'll do everything we can," Ranma spared Shampoo a quick look to silently remind her of that fact; just in case. He was well aware of her animosity towards both Pink and Link. He turned back to the distraught herbalist. "What happened here?"

Link wiped her forehead, smearing some of the plant oils and grime there, before turning to where her sister lay unconscious. "Amazons attack… attack with no warning. No one know why. They crazy, have some kind of sickness…"

"We know," Shampoo curtly interrupted, switching back to her broken Japanese instead of far better English. "What happen next?"

Link described just that. "Amazon garrison, they go try talk to their sisters, but they… they killed… All peoples of the village try and run away. Was very dark, many never know what happening. Pin Ke say we should try and escape, too, but I no want leave people behind. She go and fight while I try and help villagers…"

Clearly, Link blamed herself for her sister's current state, and her voice nearly broke as she struggled through the rest of what happened.

"We try and save some of them, but they… they afraid, and Amazons follow us into plants." Link looked down, hiding her face. "Everyone get hurt and poisoned and there no enough cure for them all…"

At that moment Konatsu walked up to Ranma's side, holding two medikits in his hands. Link looked back at them with some surprise, not having heard Konatsu's silent footsteps. She didn't recognize him, couldn't since they'd never met, but she did recognize the Red Cross on the medikits. Ranma took that as his cue to leave; Shampoo and Konatsu were both better at field medic work than he or Ukyou were.

"Get them stable and ready to move out, ASAP," Ranma switched briefly back to English to make sure the latter phrase sunk in. Handing the ninja boy his own medikit to make sure he had enough to work with, Ranma gave him a brief nod and headed back towards the hole they'd made in the wooden shell Link and Pink had erected as a last defense. Outside, Ukyou stood watch, one hand on her battle spatula and the other holding her laser pistol.

"Something wrong?" he asked, eyes scanning the dense nest of foliage all around them.

She nodded, and looked up. "Smoke."

Ranma tilted his head upwards and saw it as well. Through the broadleaves and vines, there was a faint line of smoke rising into the sky, even against the downward assault of the rain. It wasn't a good sign.

"Claymores?" Ukyou asked, referring to the small number of area denial booby-traps she carried, a bit of haste slipping into her voice.

"Do it," he replied, eyes narrowing behind his impassive helmet visor. "I'd bet we have company coming."

* * *

"How is the eye?"

Ryouga carefully removed the cold towel from his face, careful not to get his face wet enough to activate his Jyusenkyou curse. Sitting alone by a small fire in the middle of the forest, under the breath taking panorama of a star strewn night sky, how wonderful would it have been if those word's had come from his beloved Akane? But they could not – they had come up with a reason to keep her out of the way, at least as long as he needed to keep a cold compress pressed to his face.

He blinked a few times, and looked at _her_.

"Let me see," her small hand cupped his chin, angling his face so she could look into his left eye. She pushed back his eyelids to keep him from blinking as she examined the swollen orb. Craning her neck during the analysis, she made a thoughtful 'hmm' sound.

"The vision's cleared up a bit," he said, but tried not to move his mouth too much for risk of jostling the rest of his head and making it hard to see into his eye. "I'd like to resume my training tomorrow, even if it isn't perfect."

"No amount of training can harden the eye, sonny boy," Cologne chided him, and let his head go. "Just be glad you don't have a retinal tear, like I thought you did."

He thought briefly about saying something like 'I'd want to train anyway' but he simply nodded. No one wanted to lose or impair their vision, and in truth, he was terribly relieved. The training for the _Bakusai Tenketsu_ was truly something not to be taken lightly.

But he _would_ master it, no matter what!

He _wouldn't_, **couldn't**, let Ranma surpass him!

"Thanks, granny. I… um, I…" he stammered, much to his embarrassment, but licked his lips and pushed forward anyway. "I suppose Akane is already asleep…?"

Cologne smiled in a mildly amused fashion.

He blushed; of course Akane was asleep. He'd been training until almost midnight, and by the time he'd washed the blood and grime and bits of stone from his abused body, it must have been long past the hour when Akane turned in. He'd missed the chance to spend a night together with her under the stars. Maybe, sitting together, he'd even have worked out the courage to hold her hand, or… or something romantic like that.

Maybe he'd have gotten something to eat, too.

His stomach rumbled, and he grinned sheepishly, still looking up at the sky. He was hungry, and there were a few rabbit snares around that he had set up and kept tied to the tree next to his backpack (to keep from getting lost when checking them), but the truth was that half of what he ate ended up thrown up during practice anyway. And when Akane cooked the food, bless her for trying so hard, it was more like it all came back up. In the end, it was probably better to skip dinner entirely.

Nonetheless, his nose twitched, smelling something more than good enough to eat. Turning to the source, he saw Cologne holding a wooden spit put through a small river fish of the kind she had originally tried training him to catch with his hands without getting wet. So: she had thought of that, too? He smiled without meaning to; he had studied many martial arts masters, but he had never truly trained with or developed a rapport with any of them except his father and grandfather.

He silently bowed his head, and took the offered meal. It wasn't much, and it was pretty lukewarm, but he could probably count on one hand the number of times someone who wasn't one of his estranged parents had given him anything. He ate slowly, taking small bites, as they sat together by the fire. Cologne had a serene, perfectly calm look on her face.

Even when he finished the little fish and tossed what was left into the fire, neither spoke. He supposed they were both loners of a similar sort and not used to making idle chit chat. Of course he was alone most of the time because of his two curses (he cursed that bastard Saotome at the thought of his Jyusenkyou curse), but he knew he wasn't very social to begin with. From what little he knew about her, Cologne was the strongest woman in the Amazon village. He could see how that would isolate someone, even against their own wishes.

Finally, inevitably, he felt he had to say something.

"I'll beat him," he vowed, staring deep into the red and orange flame. "He can't be stronger than me. Not someone like _that_."

For a while, Cologne said nothing, and then she closed her eyes and sighed.

"I know that feeling well."

Wearily, she stood back up, leaning heavily on her walking stick. It was an almost comical sight – this tiny old woman, shorter than even the staff she held. But she was strong; powerful almost beyond normal human conception. Slowly, the ancient Amazon began to retreat back to the other campsite with the sleeping bags.

"Tomorrow," she said, suddenly, and without turning around. "Tomorrow, you will see the breaking point. It is a difficult technique, and one tenth of the way towards being called a master of the _godai_. It brings joy to the twilight years of an old woman to see youngsters with so much potential."

Ryouga felt a surge of pride at that, even though the praise had to be shared with his hated rival.

"And if things here don't work out…" She looked at him with a lewd expression and smiled teasingly. "I'm sure we can find an Amazon wife for you easily enough!"

He made a half disgusted face and tried to hide his red face by quickly looking away. "Goodnight, granny!"

She cackled mirthfully behind his back.

"Good night, sonny boy."

* * *

Ryouga flexed his _ki_, and the earth trembled.

Amid the slowly raining debris of what used to be a one story storefront, Elder Pi Lu weaved between the flying stone and mortar. The two had been fighting for almost five minutes, and the lost boy had finally felt confident in his analysis of her fighting capabilities. Pi Lu was no Khu Lon, though she had that same great well of _ki_ within her. Her mind was addled and clouded by the Venom that had seeped through her skin, and she seemed to lack Cologne's vast knowledge of pressure points and counter strikes.

What she had instead was brute force.

With a brush of her hand, she knocked aside an overturned stone table that had to weigh at least two tons. When she stomped down one of her feet, the ground cracked, and a precise series of blasting points (though he thought of them more like 'expanding' points) triggered beneath him. A dozen lances of stone, the tips almost diamond sharp, erupted from out of the ground aiming to impale him from every side. She, too, seemed to be testing the limits of his abilities, as that many incoming objects were the absolute upper limit to the number of different breaking points he could spread across his body at one time. Rather than try triggering them all before they could turn him into a kebob, the instant they touched his skin, he sent a pulse of _ki_ into the ground from his right foot, destroying the base of the front four and rolling out of the way.

He spun in place, boots carving a curved line in the muddy ground, sweeping his arms out to the side. The lances of stone had shifted, adjusted, and reacquired him. Just inches from his face and upper body, all of the eight remaining stone spears exploded into wet clumps of dirt. Triggering a breaking point from any part of the body was child's play compared to triggering several of them, using different parts of the body, all at the same time.

He stood, blocked a strike with his left hand that felt almost as if a grenade had gone off, and retrieved a bladed bandanna. Looking up, he could see another rain of explosive stone, but just as worryingly, he'd lost track of Pi Lu's movement. Silently summoning a _shishi hokoudan_ in his left hand, he let it violently disperse in a wide shotgun-like spray of mental energy, tearing most of the explosive 'delayed breaking point' rocks to pieces in midair. The few that made it through the conflagration were immediately sheared by a buzzsaw of iron cloth.

He caught sight of a rapid movement at the edge of his field of vision. It was Pi Lu, alright, skating along the surface of the ground, leaving a messy trail of upturned mud and water in her wake. Droplets seemed to spin, frozen, in midair, and the rainfall continued to fall as a mind numbingly slow pace. It wasn't just faster than human movement; it was faster than human perception. The two of them were basically equal in that respect and he knew from experience that she would not willingly close the gap with him… not until he was weak, and ready for the _coup de gras_.

It was time to use the two advantages he usually didn't have: his brain and his gear.

Reaching down to his belt, he liberated his H&K Mk23 US SOCOM and took aim. By his estimation, his target was moving in a shallow curve at around fifty to fifty five kilometers per hour, which was a respectable dash speed even by Ranma's standards. Holding the handgun steady, he adjusted his footing and fired. Three 45ACP caliber bullets, traveling as a speed of around two hundred meters per second (it would have been more, but the range was just so damn short), crossed the distance between Ryouga and Pi Lu in an eleventh of a second. All three pinged harmlessly off of the stone bracers covering the Amazon Elder's arms.

'Good,' he thought, turning out of the way as three narrow stone blades shot up out of the ground in front of him. Sweeping his arm after avoiding being impaled, he shattered them, triggered a breaking point under his feet to prevent the sinkhole forming there, and fired again. She was more wary this time, and two of the shots missed, while the third was again deflected.

He couldn't move as quickly as she could, not with the ground as muddy and slippery as it was now, but he was able to step into a reasonably high speed flying step. Predictably, Pi Lu cut short her own movement, cutting to a stop like an ice skater. She still didn't want to close with him; even now that he'd drawn a gun on her. He pulled back his left hand, and out from the side came the bandanna he had thrown earlier, slicing a line in the ground as it came in fast and low. Pi Lu saw or sensed it coming, set her stance, and blocked it with the stone bracers around her legs.

Hibiki style 'iron cloth' _Tetsununo_ bandannas could cut through a solid tree in one pass without stopping. Once, Ryouga had even been able to cut corded steel wire with it. Here, the bandanna hit with full force, cut a narrow groove in the stone, and twisted before plowing into the mud. The test proved that he had been correct in his earlier assumption – that was no normal stone bound to her arms and legs. Like he had done with his old umbrella, Pi Lu had used her _ki _to modify the physical properties of what she wore.

Not surprisingly, the .45 caliber rounds of his SOCOM couldn't do a thing against that kind of defense. Firing again, with one hand, he used his left to retrieve his other _less conventional_ handgun. Just as expected, Pi Lu stood and blocked the three bullets with her forearm bracers. When he fired with the gun in his other hand, however, she made the fatal mistake of treating it just like she had the SOCOM.

The mistake was that there was a huge difference between 200 meters per second and light speed. A difference of around 1.5 million times, to be exact. Had she known the nature of this weapon, in fact, or had he used this weapon first, Ryouga was sure that she would have concentrated in dodging the muzzle and the expected bullet trajectory. No one wants to block an attack they haven't seen at least once before. After being fired at by a regular handgun several times, a laser had to come as an unexpected surprise.

The beam dwelled on her cheek for all of a tenth of a second before her stone bracer got in the way. By then, she was already blind in one eye, and half her face had been cooked away. In a normal person, even that brief moment of exposure would have been so painful and dehabilitating as to knock them on their ass, if not out of the fight. Pi Lu's Venom infected state kept her upright and conscious despite the damage. A burning scorch on her bracer smoked in the rain.

"It's over," Ryouga said, holstering the now nearly empty SOCOM. The hand was better spent steadying his aim with the laser pistol. He fired and she tried to block, but the beam trailed over her right hand, slicing it in two. He was about to try again, looking for the headshot that would finally put her down, when he felt a surge in _ki_ beneath him.

'This again?!'

A burst of ki from his right foot destroyed the stone spear just as it was forming, but that was only the beginning. He could feel through his _sakkijutsu_ and his own mastery of the breaking point that more were forming – many more. Worse, he could see that Pi Lu was sinking into the safety of the ground. Elbowing another upward thrusting stone spear with his right arm, sliding his heel into the base of another, and firing at the descending Pi Lu, he felt the two breaking points go off, but virtually all of his laser pistol's energy ended up wasted on the woman's armbands.

There was little time to lament lost opportunities. He had to keep moving, keep striking; keep intercepting the lances of stone coming at him from every direction. He whirled like a dynamo, arms and fists moving in arcs both broad and short as he struck with sliding feet and knees. Every second or two he would also have to send a small pulse into the ground to keep it from engulfing his feet or pulling him under or otherwise breaking his ever shifting stance.

'Damnit!' he cursed, blocking a shotgun wave of razor edged fragments and shrapnel with his right hand, blurring it to nearly _amaguriken_ level speeds, where a hundred strikes seemed to merge into one. He turned ninety degrees, sensing another attack, and nearly stopped in surprise: one of the already dispatched infected Amazons was about to strike, swinging her sword at him despite the conspicuous lack of a head on her shoulders.

He caught the blade in his hand, elbowed another granite spearpoint, and fired three times with his T-6B, burning three identical holes in this newcomer's body. They were not haphazard shots; each one severed the spinal cord in a different spot. The Amazon continued to try and press her weapon down, but the blade was between his fingers, and it wouldn't budge an inch against his own formidable strength. Annoyed, he pulled back and swung his elbow up, launching the woman into the air towards him before introducing her sternum to his elbow in the most bone and ligament crushing fashion.

In that brief contact he felt it.

He frowned. That was why this crippled and destroyed body remained upright, and why it had interfered in his fight with Pi Lu. There could be no mistaking it: there were inorganic breaking points within the headless woman's body. It was a nice move, and he could see how it would form an effective counter to someone who had mastered the traditional form of the breaking point, which was entirely ineffective against or through an organic medium.

The animated corpse landed nimbly on its feet, and Ryouga turned to brush aside another attack, this time from a second Amazon. Like before, this one should by all rights have been dead; the upper half of the head was simply gone. Behind him, a third advanced, wielding a horse killing sword the length of her own body. He sent another pulse into the ground, pre-empting yet another attempt to draw him underground.

Putting away his laser pistol, Ryouga snarled and lunged into the one he had just blocked with his free hand. She wielded twin _bonbori_, massive iron weights like oversized maces, but he wasn't concerned with that. These puppets were more distraction than true danger. Pi Lu was assuming he couldn't do anything substantial to them, and that they would distract him enough for a more lethal move to get through.

Splaying out his fingers, he slammed his palm into the lower torso of the mace wielding body, dug his fingers into the flesh there, and lifted her off her feet. There were any number of dead bodies lying around; he couldn't afford to waste any unnecessary time or energy on any one of them. Luckily, he would not need to use the full version of the bastardized _Seirensho Tenketsu_, just enough to set off the normal breaking points within the body. The flesh around where his fingers found purchase began to burn, and a second later he tossed the body onto the ground.

It hadn't looked like much, but his strike had not only destroyed the network of stone particles within the animated corpse, but fused them as well, with the power of his Smelting Point. The one with the sword came in before he could be sure that Pi Lu wouldn't be able to re-reanimate the one he had just defeated. The decapitated Amazon swung her sword with what must, once, have been a practiced blow. Compared to Kuno, however, what speed and skill she had was a poor joke.

Stepping in, he caught her wrist, turned so his back was to her front and nearly pressed against him, and simultaneously disarmed her with one hand and slammed a palm into her midriff with the other. A blistered handprint appeared where he had struck, and in an instant, her entire body seemed to stiffen and freeze solid. The third, wielding twin swords, was simply too slow. A palm strike plowed into her right breast, sending her spinning like a top before falling hard to the ground.

'Now… before you can make any more of them!' Ryouga didn't waste time. Stomping down, he sent a pulse of _ki_ into a breaking point several feet under the surface of the earth. Like a depth charge, it reached a certain substratum and exploded, sending shockwaves through the ground. A shallow crater formed in the surface from the blast below it.

Slamming his heel down again, and again and again, he began to zero in on where Pi Lu was hiding. She wasn't stone herself, so she would be in an area of the earth with no natural blasting points. That 'vacant' area seemed to move and confirm his suspicions. He kept up his barrage, finally forcing Pi Lu entirely onto the defensive. After only a few seconds, the entire swath of the village of Yaocaicun where they had been fighting was leveled and cratered like the surface of the moon.

"Finally!" he sneered behind his helmet, his heel drumming a steady beat of explosions under the earth. He'd caught her between explosions, and proceeded to increase not only the power but the rapidity of the breaking points all around her. He triggered one every third of a second, as an ever widening and deepening crater began to form where one of Yaocaicun's one story homes had once been.

Finally, he raised his whole foot and stomped down; the crater tore open from the massive breaking point triggered below. A geyser of rubble and broken stone and earth filled the air, and amid it, one crushed and broken human body. Pi Lu landed hard, and right against one of the broken stone lances created during the fight. Her back broke with an audible crack, and she slumped to the ground, motionless. Now able to get a good look, Ryouga could see that her neck had already been broken and skull caved in by the underground barrage.

The infant _shishi hokoudan_ he had been forming in his hand faded away.

Looking around, he couldn't find any of India Squad, so he took a deep breath and radioed in. His Command HUD indicated they were all alive, at least. "Squad. Report."

"Ryu, here," Ryu answered first. "We're over by the marketplace."

"Finally finished leveling that part of town, huh?" Mousse joked.

"We have also found two most fortunate survivors," Kuno added, "A brother a sister who had taken auspicious shelter within a storage freezer."

"Good," Ryouga took a step, and then paused. "Uhm…. Mousse, I'm going to need you to come and lead me to where you are."

To their credit, and his unspoken relief, no one snickered about his 'directional handicap.'

"I'm on my way, Lieutenant."

* * *

Zraz looked down at the larval human clinging to her father's leg. He'd never seen one so small and helpless looking before. Most of the humans he had experiences and memories about were large, and of their 'male' gender. Even the sire of this immature human seemed to be slightly on the small side. It was hard to believe that such unimpressive specimens were worth sending an entire strike force to retrieve.

All for what: some little pools of stagnant water?

Slithering along a wet stone path, Zraz caught sight of the Sectoids as well as Sneer, easily identified by his titian robes. A small number of humans stood nearby under the Ethereal's mental thrall. Some of these had to be the potential Trenchards he had been told about. They didn't look very impressive to the Snakeman, unarmed as they were and standing around with blank expressions on their faces.

Zraz heard the little human they were escorting mutter something. Her father replied, and then they hushed up. The snakeman Commander looked over his shoulder at them and the small one immediately went back to hiding behind the larger of the pair. The language these humans spoke was completely unintelligible, just like the scribbles they used for writing. Zraz had a spare Mind Probe on him, but if he could, his preference was to avoid it.

Sneer floated in their direction, and the humans behind Zraz began to make frightened squeals and other strange noises. He was on the verge of having one of his soldiers forcibly restrain the two humans when, abruptly, they shut up. Checking for himself Zraz could see their faces were slack and their eyes wide and dull.

So: Sneer was already taking what he wanted from them?

It took only a moment for the Ethereal to tear the knowledge it desired from the minds of the two humans. They collapsed into blissful unconsciousness just as Sneer turned and floated slowly back towards the muddy little pools of water. Zraz let out a low pitched sound, the snakeman equivalent of a sigh, and slithered over to where the humans lay.

"What do we do with them?" One of the soldiers who had escorted the humans asked the question, but didn't make any effort to aim his rifle at the prone targets. Zraz had no ostensible problem executing the two, and since the Ethereal had not given him orders either way, it seemed there was little reason not to.

Except…

This whole thing with the pools seemed… well, dubious. To begin with, the whole notion of "metamorphic" life forms seemed outlandish, even by Star Spawn standards. On the other claw, the ancient and inert molecular control network on Earth had caused some strange natural phenomenon… Who knew what these humans knew that Sneer had discounted? If everything he had been told about what the Sectoids planned to do here was true, it would be wise to keep any possible sources of local knowledge alive… at least for the immediate future.

"Leave them," Zraz said, and headed towards the cold springs the locals called 'Jyusenkyou.' There, one of the human test subjects was just stepping into one of the pools of water. By what he knew about human mammal physiology, it was a female, but not immature like the other one. It stepped into the water, immersed itself, and emerged.

It was followed by what Zraz assumed to be a male. This one emerged as a female. Snakemen only had a single gender, so the change was not exactly jaw dropping to Zraz, but it was academically interesting. He didn't know any aliens with genders. The Mutons had two genders, but were all cybernetically sterilized soon after maturation. The Ethereals used to reproduce, but didn't any more.

The Sectoids had the human test subjects try out the opposite pool, too, which turned the female into a male. Only when they were sure of the effects did they begin to immerse themselves. They entered looking like identical clones and emerged that way too, a fact Zraz found quite funny.

"Commander," Zrell contacted him through The Mind. "We have the object and the larval human."

Zraz turned towards the tall mountain to the south where Zrell and his soldiers had been sent on their mission. In an instant, all the information related to the mission, from losses incurred to enemies killed to ammunition expended, all of it was available for his perusal via The Mind. Zraz did not like to nit pick or micromanage his command level subordinates, however, so he rarely became personally involved. The mission seemed to have been as easy as clipping one's claws, anyway.

Sensing all this, Sneer's cold Ethereal mind touched his own.

"Return immediately," Zraz commanded, whatever levity he'd had now erased. Sneer's mind left his, and the Snakeman Commander warily turned to the north. There was some trouble there from what he had heard. Less than a third as many hosts had been around by the time the terror units got unloaded and herded in the right direction. Also worrying were scout reports of fighting near one of the local habitations.

The human defenders sure hadn't wasted any time. It was a pity about all those lost hosts, that much was true, but the situation was still favorable. According to The Mind, he had exactly _one hundred and five_ mature Chryssalids in the area.

It was time to start using them.


	58. The Twilight of the Amazons IV

**Author's quick note: **Takahashi's Chinese characters all have strange names, as you've seen: Shampoo, Mousse, Cologne, Pink, Link, Saffron, Rouge, Plum, etc. For the purposes of narration in TRTC, my tendency is to spell out the names based on character POV. Shampoo 'thinks' and pronounces her name 'Shan Pu' instead of 'Shampoo,' for example, and it will be spelled in that respect during the narrative itself. When talking in either English or Japanese, character's names will typically be simplified. So Shan Pu, saying her name in English, may well come out as "Shampoo." I think this is a little more consistent with the manga and anime, where Shampoo does refer to herself in the third person occasionally using the non-chinese pronunciation.

**Mr Qwerty** caught an error, and I've just corrected it with this update.

* * *

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. The UNETCO timetable moves ever forward, but a new complication has arisen as the alien forces in the Far East surge out in unexpected numbers and with surprising fury. India and Juliet Squads have taken the _Procyon_, a cargo ship operated by the alien enthralled Sirius Group, and uncovered the existence of a terrible chemical weapon based on Chryssalid Venom. But already the Amazon village has been made a martyr – the first field test of a weapon the Sirius Group hopes to use against the city of Singapore.

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia **

Chapter XX

_Twilight of the Amazons (Part 2) _

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

_Awesome_. 

She tried not to look overawed, but inside, Akane felt like she was a kid again, riding in a bullet train for the first time. And her current ride make even the most modern Shinkansen look like a snail by comparison. Not only was this her first real mission as part of Golf Squad, but she had gotten a berth in the pride of the UNETCO Arsenal: Seiran Mountain's "Avenger" Advanced Multi-role fighter-transporter. It was the fastest, most heavily armored, largest, and most expensive to operate vehicle XCOM had at its disposal.

She stole a quick look out the tinted window just to her left, and saw the world screaming by so fast it was less than a blur – it was a smudge. She couldn't imagine how the pilot managed to steer the ship at such a high speed over the rough contours of central China. Sure the Avenger burned precious Elerium-115 like an American SUV, but when Command simply _needed_ to get a squad or six to a spot anywhere on earth in an hour or less, or take down an alien Battleship, there really was no substitute! Ranma and Ryouga had yet to take a ride in an Avenger; who among the two squads would ever have guessed that Akane Tendo would be the first among them to do so?

As befitting XCOM's premier weapon of war, the inside of the Avenger was ergonomic, efficient, and spacious. It was a true hybrid vessel; making use of alien technology and human design, rather than being simply a carbon copy of a UFO. There was ample room inside for up to twenty six fully equipped soldiers, all wearing powered armor. Alternatively, ten armored soldiers could accompany up to four HWPs, or Heavy Weapons Platforms.

Presently, the ship was hauling a mixed compliment: in the center of the hold were three HWPs, all in a row. One was tracked, and two were hovering silently off the ground. The tracked one was (she recalled from her training and 'reading rainbow' psionic indoctrination) a Type-3/L Automatic Tank, equipped primarily with a single heavy laser cannon and a small reserve of mini-missiles. Both weapons were mounted on a swiveling turret on the main body, flanked by sheets of exotic alloy armor, especially on the front. There were also handholds on the front and top, and around the inset floodlights. A pull-out handlebar on the front looked like it was also well suited to towing, or for mounting frontal modifications like a bulldozer. Several armored 'eyes' stood out on the sides and on the turret itself, giving the internal computer and the human handler almost perfect three hundred and sixty degree vision in any direction.

The two Plasma armed hovertanks looked less 'human' and resembled more closely their alien forefathers: the Sectoid Cyberdisks. Their bodies were smooth alien alloy, and Akane wondered if the engineers who maintained them polished the surfaces to such a lustrous sheen, or if it was just a natural consequence of how they were manufactured. The hovertanks didn't have the ragged camouflage she saw draped and attached onto the normal automated tanks, and if anything, they looked conspicuous enough to be almost taunting the enemy. A round spherical 'head' was set in place of a turret on the top of the saucer shaped body, with a small armored protrusion that was the exit point for the internal plasma weapon. Looking closely, she could see the 'eyes' of the machine safely set behind transparent alloy armor.

Hugging the walls of the cabin were the fourteen soldiers under the command of Captain Bruce Banks, including Akane herself. It would have been beyond cramped if they had all been wearing powered armor, but as it was, only about half of them actually were. Captain Banks stood at the back with his armor half on, describing the mission ahead, their goals, and the individual squad objectives.

Most everyone present was, like their commanding officer, half in and half out of their respective personal or powered armor. Not wanting to stand out, Akane had done the same, though she had to fight against feeling too embarrassed about doing so. XCOM armor was a climate controlled body glove on the inside, and she had realized early on that, in the interests of comfort, pretty much everyone made due with wearing only undergarments. Reluctantly, she had done the same, agonizing over it for some time before finally picking out a few light T-shirts to help preserve a little extra modesty. It wasn't that she was embarrassed by her body – she was in damn good shape, and contrary to Ranma's teasing, most boys certainly liked how she looked – but she didn't want to seem… immature compared to the women present.

She hated just thinking about feeling like that; it would be ten times worse than when people compared her negatively to Kasumi. Both to her mixed relief and annoyance, no one seemed to give her any real notice. The longer it went on, though, the more it began to seem unflattering instead of comforting. She'd been well prepared for the actual prosecution of a mission, and in the technical execution of it all, but nothing had really given her a feel for how different it would seem to be among people like her team mates. Akane hugged her chest as she listened to Banks describe how Echo Squad would be spearheading the attack on the occupied Amazon village.

It made sense. Echo was probably the most decorated and elite squad in Seiran, maybe even in the entire Eastern Theatre of the alien war. It would be their job to escort and advance with the HWPs and blaze a trail west from the LZ to the Amazon village and the landed alien ship there. Even though she had personally been to the region before, Akane had never seen overhead pictures of it, or seen the features mapped out. The Guide's daughter, Plum, had possessed a really bad map (like the kind Ryouga would draw on one of his good days) roughly indicating where major settlements and landmarks were, but nothing like UNETCO Intel had pulled together over the last half hour.

According to the Captain, the plan was for the primary assault elements to leave Seiran in an Avenger and a Lightning, eventually landing east of the Amazon village, near a town called Dōngmenkou. Securing the village and setting up a beachhead and 'active artillery zone,' the assault and fire support squads would advance along the main road, clearing out aliens and ferrying (if possible) any human survivors east towards the safe rear area under XCOM control. The area to the south was mostly swamps and cliffs, up to where it almost met the town. There was an old coal mine there, and the remains of a railroad station. Both would be used to house survivors, the wounded, and to cover the landed Avenger.

They would sweep west, destroying and pushing back the aliens, until they met up with the northern assault forces and took the Amazon village itself. The village itself was in something of a cul-de-sac, flanked to the southeast and west by mountains and broken hills. South of the village was a swampland that Intel had identified, correctly, as Jyusenkyou. There was also a pass there (called Pass 11 on the map) that led further south to Phoenix Mountain. The south wasn't seen as being very troublesome, given that they were facing Snakemen (a species that preferred level terrain), but there were marshes and rice patties to slog through in the north.

"Lastly," Banks said, coming to the end of the briefing. "I want everyone to keep an eye out for this woman…"

He held up a picture, made sure everyone got a look at it, and then passed it down to the closest soldier. It would be handed up and down the ranks, so everyone got a good look. The Avenger was designed for in-flight briefings, and it had a monitor built into the front and back, but it couldn't have been uncommon for commanders to take a more informal approach to it. For its part, XCOM gave a lot of operational leeway in regards to officer's preference and style, probably because of how diverse its troops were.

From what Akane had seen of the picture, though, the woman was blonde haired and blue eyed – the typical Caucasian woman one thought of. She didn't have glasses or any real outstanding features otherwise, but there couldn't be many with her Scandinavian features on the ground in the middle of western China. Akane had never actually met any blue-eyed and blonde-haired girls or women before joining UNETCO (or boys, for that matter), and she had been secretly a little disappointed by how serious and… normal they seemed. She'd sort of been hoping they would be ditzy or hyper or something like that, but the personal pool at UNETCO was, she supposed, inherently skewed against that sort of personality anyway.

'She shouldn't be hard to find,' Akane thought, 'Unless a Chryssalid catches her…"

"This woman is Dr. Erika Hatledal. She's one of ours," he said that last part with a bit more passion and force than Akane had expected. It made sense: XCOM passionately looked after and protected its own people.

"…about five foot seven, a little over a hundred ten pounds - shouldn't be too hard to spot, considering where we're landing. She's an anthropologist working for the Research Division. They imbedded her in this area a month ago because of her xeno-archeology experience."

Banks paused, let the picture circulate a bit and then continued.

"If she's alive, you're to do whatever you can to get her to safety. I'll leave it up to the squad leaders to determine if the situation is worth the risk, but I will stress again that Command wants her back. The brass and the RD also want her notes, which should be in her laptop. We've got a tracer on both of 'em, so keep an eye out. Alright! That's it ladies and gentlemen. ETA in thirty two and counting!"

The briefing now officially over, the room gradually dissolved into chatting among the individual squads. There wasn't a lot of room to move or mill around, and they were all segregated into teams, so most of the talk was confined along those lines. There was something the briefing hadn't covered that she was worried about, though, and after hesitating for a few seconds, Akane stood and cleared her throat.

"C-Captain!" she still wasn't totally used to working in such a marked hierarchy, and she would have been kidding herself if she had said she wasn't slightly intimidated by those higher up than herself (Ranma and Ryouga not included).

"Captain!" she shouted, just loud enough to be sure he would hear her over the talking in the cabin. "Um, one question, sir?"

Banks, who had been in the middle of arranging his gear (including one very conspicuous Blaster Bomb launcher), looked up at her. "What is it, Squaddie?"

"I was wondering about India and Juliet Squads," she pressed on, getting to the root of her concern. "You said they were doing recon and recovery in the north. Are they all ok?"

Banks nodded, and went back to his man-portable guided artillery.

"They're all in the green," he replied. "I wouldn't worry about them if I were you."

'Well, your fiancé isn't one of them,' Akane thought. How could she not worry, at least a little, after that idiot Ranma and her other friends?

"Thanks, sir," she said, and sat back down between Squaddies Lohse and Khan. The former smiled at her in a friendly manner and handed her the picture of Dr. Hatledal. Akane took a quick look at it and passed it down to her Indian teammate, who seemed to be engaged in carefully cleaning and double checking his rifle.

"I saw one of your friends fight, you know," Squaddie Lohse said, giving Akane a friendly jab. "I did pretty well in close combat training back home, but I don't think I'd have lasted two seconds against him."

Akane could see she was trying to be re-assuring, and appreciated the gesture.

"Which one was it?" she asked.

"The guy with the little braid in his hair," Lohse answered, reaching behind her head and miming where the described pigtail would have been.

"That's Ranma." Akane smiled a bit (not in pride, of course!). "Yeah, he's pretty good… he's really good… but he's probably the biggest jerk you'll ever find on base. And his ego… Don't get me started!"

Janis Lohse listened to her with a knowing expression on her face, as if she could hear something in Akane's words that had nothing to do with the quality of her English. After extolling Ranma's 'humble virtues,' Akane paused, noting her teammate's discerning grin.

"…what?" Akane asked, a little pointedly.

"Nothing!" Squaddie Lohse replied, just a little _too_ quickly. "Who was the older guy he was fighting? Glasses? Headscarf?"

"That's his dad," Akane didn't like having to call Genma 'dad' in any language, but it had slipped out before she had given it much thought. If she had been speaking in Japanese, she would have been sure to say 'that's Genma, Ranma's father' or something like that.

"Genma," she quickly said. "He's pretty good, too, but he's 'retired.' Meaning he just wants to sit around, play _shogi_, and eat."

"You seem to know them pretty well."

Akane casually shrugged. "They lived with my family for a while." She laughed. "Actually about two years." She could see Janis was surprised by this, so she explained, "My dad and Genma are old friends. They trained under the same Master, you see, and I guess they were sort-of rivals, too."

The older woman smirked at that. "Almost like family, huh?"

Akane huffed, but didn't disagree. "That's one way of putting it."

"Sorry to butt in ladies…" Sergeant Winther may have been sorry, but that wouldn't stop him from doing just that. He stood over them, holding a bandolier of grenades in one hand, and a pen in the other. It looked as if he had just come back from the ship's armory.

"Sergeant!" Lohse immediately took a professional tone, but didn't salute. The Sergeant had made it clear he didn't like being saluted or anything of the sort, not the least because many Squaddies in XCOM had been officers in their pre-admission careers. He liked an informal unit, considering discipline in action far more important than discipline in words.

"Sergeant," Akane greeted him, and stared at the grenades. There were a lot there – XCOM troopers rarely carried so many.

"A little present for you, Tendo," Winther said, handing the bandolier to her.

Akane took them, but with a look of surprise on her face. "These are…!"

"You are fully certified for both alien grenades and the AN M14 TH3, are you not?" It wasn't much of a question; he knew she was, and didn't wait for her to answer. "You've got one Hell of an arm, Tendo. I've never seen anyone throw as far or as accurate as you do."

Akane beamed; she wasn't the best shot, probably never would be, but she could _throw_. The number of times she had beaned Ranma in the back of the head with a statue or concrete block or other extremely-heavy-object-that-should-not-be-thrown was proof of that fact. Normally (especially for Ranma) this wasn't exactly her most endearing or attractive trait, but it felt good – so damn good – to have someone acknowledge it and her.

"Thank you, Sergeant!"

"It's the truth," he replied, "Just remember: those alien grenades are a lot more powerful than an M61 or HG85. That means you have to be extra careful of friendlies in the area, even the ones covered head to toe in powered armor. As for the M14s… if you see anything dark and fast, you don't hesitate to light it up. We'll be relying on you for that, especially."

Akane nodded, and Sergeant Winter pulled Squaddie Lohse aside to retrieve the incendiary ordinance she would be using in the upcoming mission. Akane watched them go, and then carefully held the grenades she'd been given. She was more familiar with the AN M14 TH3 than she was with the alien grenades. The M14 was relatively cheap, so she'd been able to practice with a few, but the alien grenades contained Elerium, and were thus very expensive (to the point of being nearly irreplaceable – Command never manufactured the grenades, though they could, instead only using those captured during missions).

The AN M14 TH3 was an incendiary grenade built around a core of thermate (as she understood it, it was an improved version of WW2 thermite), allowing it to burn through more than a half inch of steel, even underwater. When set off, a portion of the thermate mixture was converted to 4,000 degree Fahrenheit molten iron. Needless to say, it was a very dangerous weapon against organic targets; a single lit particle could burn through skin, nerves, muscle, even bone. It was probably illegal for military use, too, but XCOM maintained a ready stockpile, both for general anti-alien operations and especially to combat Chryssalids (which were resistant to most weapons except fire and plasma). Luckily for XCOM operatives, powered armor was effectively invulnerable to fire (even the powerful M14 TH3), and personal armor was highly resistant.

The bulbous black alien grenade was another story altogether.

It had more than twice the lethal radius of an M61 (which had an effective killing radius of 5 meters, and a 'likely' casualty radius of 15 meters), and instead of a spray of shrapnel or molten metal, it created a short lived cloud of plasma (which, coincidentally, also then kicked up a cloud of high speed debris). Like all alien weapons, it was designed to be highly effective in both the vacuum of space and in an atmosphere. Even a soldier in MARS Powered Armor had to be wary of an alien grenade going off nearby, as exposure to the epicenter of the blast was akin to standing on the surface of the sun (albeit only for a second or so).

"ETA: Twenty minutes," the pilot reminded them. "There's a little shower over the area, but it should be moving off by the time we get there."

Akane looked up, surprised so much time had passed. Everyone was getting dressed. Picking up the torso section of her personal armor, she turned it in her hands until she could see the little laminated sticker Nabiki had printed out for her, bearing a crossed hammer/mallet and _shinai_ (a bamboo practice sword). On the sides, in Japanese, were the words 'kitchen destroyer.' Of course it was just the kind of insulting half-joke that was typical of her older sister, but Akane found herself smiling as she saw it. It reminded her of her family, and the people she was fighting for, and just as importantly, the _respect_ she was fighting for. She'd put the sticker on the shoulder, where anyone could see it.

Twenty minutes later, the back of the Avenger opened wide, flooding the cabin with sunlight. By then she was suited up, keyed in, and psyched. The pilot's warning: "Hot LZ! Hot LZ!' could do little to diminish her high spirits. Rushing out with the rest of Golf Squad, following close behind the HWPs, Akane Tendo returned to Jyusenkyou.

* * *

It was a weary and ragged looking India Squad that staggered into the rough basecamp Ranma had organized. Despite the dwindling rain, their stealth suits (having now gone right from one brutal mission into another meat grinder) were a real mess in terms of splattered blood and ripped up outer layers, though all were uncompromised in terms of NBC coverage. Ranma made sure to personally be there to greet them and wave them in along one of the safe routes.

"Yo," he called, as they came into view. "Rough morning?"

"About the usual," Ryu answered for the team, since he was on point. It was their standard formation: Ryu in front, followed by Ryouga (lest he get everyone lost), then Kuno and then Mousse. That last member of India Squad was also saddled, this time, with two other burdens in the form of the young brother and sister they had found in Yaocaicun itself.

It was amazing that the two children had survived, and Ranma was glad that they had done so and unharmed by the ordeal no less. Taking refuge in a meat freezer had been damn risky, since there apparently hadn't been any way to unlock it from the inside. Had the attacking Amazons been able to keep their wits about them then it certainly wouldn't have worked. It was lucky in a way, then, that the Amazons had been too crazed and blood lusted by the Venom weapon that they'd ignored or overlooked any target that wasn't immediately obvious.

"Ranma." It was about as hearty a greeting as Ryouga ever gave, in Ranma's opinion. Well, unless you were Akane or Akari, in which case stuttering and mumbling while twiddling his thumbs became the order of the day. Stopping with Ryu next to Juliet Squad's Lieutenant, he then asked, "Where are you keeping the wounded?"

"Konatsu and Shampoo have got a little triage thing set up over there, outside the poison glade," he pointed over to an intact building that could once have been both a home and a store. It was at the very edge of town, pretty much, next to a tiny outhouse that was missing two walls and providing only half the privacy it should have. The building looked pretty sturdy, though, and provided shelter from the rain and mud.

Beyond that point, though, the flora got pretty hostile.

"Ukyou's working the rounds, setting up Claymores and M86's," Ranma pointed out, refreshing the other squad leader on the immediate situation. "Since Command wants the area secure, I figure we can hold out here 'till reinforcements let us take that road south. I've mapped it out, and the topography and stuff looks pretty good; we just gotta keep the southeast covered."

Ryouga nodded. "Mousse - find Ukyou and help secure the perimeter."

The walking arsenal of weapons and equipment that was Mousse chuckled at the prospect. Unlike most anyone else in the two squads (save maybe Ukyou), he actually enjoyed setting traps, seeing it as a clever and skillful part of his fighting style and not a dishonorable means of stealing victory.

"Gladly!" Mousse said, and then spoke briefly in Chinese to the boy holding his hand (the older of the two children they had rescued). Kuno took Mousse's place, silently holding out his hand for the boy to take. His younger sister clung to him tightly, probably nearly as afraid of the men in black armor as she was the madwomen that had attacked their village.

Once Mousse was on his way, Ryouga addressed Kuno: "Get those kids over to the triage center and check them out. If they're infected, have them tranquilized. Then see if Konatsu needs any help."

"It shall be promptly done," Kuno pronounced, and started leading the two children away. That left only Ranma, Ryouga, and Ryu.

"Sir?" Ryu asked, one word being more than enough to get across his question.

"We could use someone out there on recon," Ranma said, and held out a small device. It was Juliet Squad's 'Budd' Light - a pulsed IR beacon used as an aid for vehicles and personnel identification and for marking obstacles, passage points, helipads, and minefields. They had only been given one per squad for Operation Winter Triangle. One would eventually have to be used to signal the reinforcements and evacuation craft, while the other could be used to mark any potential trouble spots in the field (particularly where just describing it was difficult).

"Don't worry about the lost boy here; I'll keep him from wandering off!" Ranma just couldn't help but include a little ribbing while he was at it. Ryouga huffed angrily, but also inclined his head, silently giving Ryu leave to scout around a bit. The Kumon heir seemed a little excited about getting off on his own, and in no time at all he was gone.

After a few seconds of mutual silence, Ryouga sighed.

"How many will make it?" he asked. It was suitably blunt and to the point, and just about what Ranma had expected Ryouga to ask.

"Well, we found eleven aside from Link," Ranma replied, voice a little weary. He sighed, too. "Two of 'em are real bad. I think the rest will be ok if we can get them to Chuqung. … It is Chuqung, right?"

Ryouga shrugged. "Are we going to send anyone out with them? Command won't be happy with unescorted civilians."

Ranma paused for a good long while before answering, "I'm sorta thinking Shampoo."

The lost one didn't reply for a good long while either.

"You think that's a good idea?"

Ranma groaned and looked up at the cloudy sky. "She'll be pissed. But I'm kinda worried about her, too. She's been real quiet, and her aura's kinda… spiky." He laughed. "Kinda like yours, actually."

Ranma could see, even with both their faces obscured by their helmets, that his counterpart and rival didn't quite agree.

"You don't think so, huh?" he asked, genuinely curious what Ryouga would do.

"I'd say… let her see this through to the end," Ryouga said, resting his rifle on his shoulder. "If you ask me, and you did, you need to stop trying to protect her and the other girls."

Ranma scoffed, not so much at the concept, but who is was coming from.

"Anyway," Ryouga eventually said, after a few seconds. "Who has the most medical experience here? We'll do the best job keeping those people stable?"

"I'd rather not part with Konatsu," Ranma complained. "I'd rather not lose any of 'em, actually."

Ryouga tilted his head, and the two stood in comfortable silence. Ranma enjoyed it; he didn't have to give any commands, for once, and he could momentarily relax. Shared command sounded like a pain, and it could be, but there was a certain reassurance in it too. Maybe it was just the knowledge that, if the shit hit the fan, it wasn't just you alone having to make split second decisions. And maybe it was just because, all things considered, he was probably closer to Ryouga than he was anyone else around… and how sad was that?

"Good fight?" he asked, breaking the silence.

"It was ok," Ryouga replied, "Would've been _great_… under different circumstances."

From what he'd heard and guessed, Ranma couldn't help but honestly and truly agree. Looking up, the sky continued to cry down on them, and on the remains of the Amazon Tribe.

"You know who's really behind this, don't you? Who told them to attack this place?"

There was a grunt of agreement – which meant Ryouga had figured it out, too. Ranma closed his eyes; secretly, he was getting tired.

"What a fucking mess."

The two martial artists turned soldiers stood side by side in the rain, just a few miles from where they had been cursed; from where their lives had so radically clashed and changed. Jyusenkyou and the rain brought back memories for them both- for Ranma, he could almost feel the lingering curse within him straining to meet the rain and be free. He could remember the shock, the fear, and uncertainty that he would be able to live his life as a man. Then there were the more recent memories…

"Ranma," Ryouga said, finally. It was time to get back to the present, and leave the reminiscing to old men; they had more immediate concerns.

"Yeah," Ranma agreed. He could feel it, too. There was something _bad_ approaching. The sniper rifle in his hands suddenly seemed surprisingly small and inadequate. But at the same time, and as cliché as it was, Ranma knew he had team members and friends that he could count on, absolutely, one hundred percent.

"Come on, P-chan. I'll show you where I want to set up the fire teams."

"Don't call me, P-chan, Ranko."

They both chuckled at the old names, from their old, easy going lives. Normally either one would have rankled, or gotten confrontational ('who are you calling P-chan/Ranko?"), but now concerns like that seemed so pointlessly trivial. It helped that Ryouga's worst memories had been wiped away along with his curse. Yes: all things considered, Ranma figured they could both afford to laugh at each other's expense, in that all too brief and pleasant moment between battles.

It was something they'd earned.


	59. The Twilight of the Amazons V

It was a weary and ragged looking India Squad that staggered into the rough basecamp Ranma had organized. Despite the dwindling rain, their stealth suits (having now gone right from one brutal mission into another meat grinder) were a real mess in terms of splattered blood and ripped up outer layers, though all were uncompromised in terms of NBC coverage. Ranma made sure to personally be there to greet them and wave them in along one of the safe routes.

"Yo," he called, as they came into view. "Rough morning?"

"About the usual," Ryu answered for the team, since he was on point. It was their standard formation: Ryu in front, followed by Ryouga (lest he get everyone lost), then Kuno and then Mousse. That last member of India Squad was also saddled, this time, with two other burdens in the form of the young brother and sister they had found in Yaocaicun itself.

It was amazing that the two children had survived, and Ranma was glad that they had done so and unharmed by the ordeal no less. Taking refuge in a meat freezer had been damn risky, since there apparently hadn't been any way to unlock it from the inside. Had the attacking Amazons been able to keep their wits about them then it certainly wouldn't have worked. It was lucky in a way, then, that the Amazons had been too crazed and blood lusted by the Venom weapon that they'd ignored or overlooked any target that wasn't immediately obvious.

"Ranma." It was about as hearty a greeting as Ryouga ever gave, in Ranma's opinion. Well, unless you were Akane or Akari, in which case stuttering and mumbling while twiddling his thumbs became the order of the day. Stopping with Ryu next to Juliet Squad's Lieutenant, he then asked, "Where are you keeping the wounded?"

"Konatsu and Shampoo have got a little triage thing set up over there, outside the poison glade," he pointed over to an intact building that could once have been both a home and a store. It was at the very edge of town, pretty much, next to a tiny outhouse that was missing two walls and providing only half the privacy it should have. The building looked pretty sturdy, though, and provided shelter from the rain and mud.

Beyond that point, though, the flora got pretty hostile.

"Ukyou's working the rounds, setting up Claymores and M86's," Ranma pointed out, refreshing the other squad leader on the immediate situation. "Since Command wants the area secure, I figure we can hold out here 'till reinforcements let us take that road south. I've mapped it out, and the topography and stuff looks pretty good; we just gotta keep the southeast covered."

Ryouga nodded. "Mousse - find Ukyou and help secure the perimeter."

The walking arsenal of weapons and equipment that was Mousse chuckled at the prospect. Unlike most anyone else in the two squads (save maybe Ukyou), he actually enjoyed setting traps, seeing it as a clever and skillful part of his fighting style and not a dishonorable means of stealing victory.

"Gladly!" Mousse said, and then spoke briefly in Chinese to the boy holding his hand (the older of the two children they had rescued). Kuno took Mousse's place, silently holding out his hand for the boy to take. His younger sister clung to him tightly, probably nearly as afraid of the men in black armor as she was the madwomen that had attacked their village.

Once Mousse was on his way, Ryouga addressed Kuno: "Get those kids over to the triage center and check them out. If they're infected, have them tranquilized. Then see if Konatsu needs any help."

"It shall be promptly done," Kuno pronounced, and started leading the two children away. That left only Ranma, Ryouga, and Ryu.

"Sir?" Ryu asked, one word being more than enough to get across his question.

"We could use someone out there on recon," Ranma said, and held out a small device. It was Juliet Squad's 'Budd' Light - a pulsed IR beacon used as an aid for vehicles and personnel identification and for marking obstacles, passage points, helipads, and minefields. They had only been given one per squad for Operation Winter Triangle. One would eventually have to be used to signal the reinforcements and evacuation craft, while the other could be used to mark any potential trouble spots in the field (particularly where just describing it was difficult).

"Don't worry about the lost boy here; I'll keep him from wandering off!" Ranma just couldn't help but include a little ribbing while he was at it. Ryouga huffed angrily, but also inclined his head, silently giving Ryu leave to scout around a bit. The Kumon heir seemed a little excited about getting off on his own, and in no time at all he was gone.

After a few seconds of mutual silence, Ryouga sighed.

"How many will make it?" he asked. It was suitably blunt and to the point, and just about what Ranma had expected Ryouga to ask.

"Well, we found eleven aside from Link," Ranma replied, voice a little weary. He sighed, too. "Two of 'em are real bad. I think the rest will be ok if we can get them to Chuqung. … It is Chuqung, right?"

Ryouga shrugged. "Are we going to send anyone out with them? Command won't be happy with unescorted civilians."

Ranma paused for a good long while before answering, "I'm sorta thinking Shampoo."

The lost one didn't reply for a good long while either.

"You think that's a good idea?"

Ranma groaned and looked up at the cloudy sky. "She'll be pissed. But I'm kinda worried about her, too. She's been real quiet, and her aura's kinda… spiky." He laughed. "Kinda like yours, actually."

Ranma could see, even with both their faces obscured by their helmets, that his counterpart and rival didn't quite agree.

"You don't think so, huh?" he asked, genuinely curious what Ryouga would do.

"I'd say… let her see this through to the end," Ryouga said, resting his rifle on his shoulder. "If you ask me, and you did, you need to stop trying to protect her and the other girls."

Ranma scoffed, not so much at the concept, but who is was coming from.

"Anyway," Ryouga eventually said, after a few seconds. "Who has the most medical experience here? We'll do the best job keeping those people stable?"

"I'd rather not part with Konatsu," Ranma complained. "I'd rather not lose any of 'em, actually."

Ryouga tilted his head, and the two stood in comfortable silence. Ranma enjoyed it; he didn't have to give any commands, for once, and he could momentarily relax. Shared command sounded like a pain, and it could be, but there was a certain reassurance in it too. Maybe it was just the knowledge that, if the shit hit the fan, it wasn't just you alone having to make split second decisions. And maybe it was just because, all things considered, he was probably closer to Ryouga than he was anyone else around… and how sad was that?

"Good fight?" he asked, breaking the silence.

"It was ok," Ryouga replied, "Would've been _great_… under different circumstances."

From what he'd heard and guessed, Ranma couldn't help but honestly and truly agree. Looking up, the sky continued to cry down on them, and on the remains of the Amazon Tribe.

"You know who's really behind this, don't you? Who told them to attack this place?"

There was a grunt of agreement – which meant Ryouga had figured it out, too. Ranma closed his eyes; secretly, he was getting tired.

"What a fucking mess."

The two martial artists turned soldiers stood side by side in the rain, just a few miles from where they had been cursed; from where their lives had so radically clashed and changed. Jyusenkyou and the rain brought back memories for them both- for Ranma, he could almost feel the lingering curse within him straining to meet the rain and be free. He could remember the shock, the fear, and uncertainty that he would be able to live his life as a man. Then there were the more recent memories…

"Ranma," Ryouga said, finally. It was time to get back to the present, and leave the reminiscing to old men; they had more immediate concerns.

"Yeah," Ranma agreed. He could feel it, too. There was something _bad_ approaching. The sniper rifle in his hands suddenly seemed surprisingly small and inadequate. But at the same time, and as cliché as it was, Ranma knew he had team members and friends that he could count on, absolutely, one hundred percent.

"Come on, P-chan. I'll show you where I want to set up the fire teams."

"Don't call me, P-chan, Ranko."

They both chuckled at the old names, from their old, easy going lives. Normally either one would have rankled, or gotten confrontational ('who are you calling P-chan/Ranko?"), but now concerns like that seemed so pointlessly trivial. It helped that Ryouga's worst memories had been wiped away along with his curse. Yes: all things considered, Ranma figured they could both afford to laugh at each other's expense, in that all too brief and pleasant moment between battles.

It was something they'd earned.

* * *

"Do you know these children, woman?"

Lin Ke wiped away the tears from the little girl that had just jumped into her arms. By the sound of this swordsman's voice, she could guess he was male, and she had to resist the impulse to kick him for not immediately rushing the two children he had been escorting out of the rain sooner. After all they had to have been through, they would be especially vulnerable to catching something out here.

"I do, yes," Link answered, picking up the pace as she led him to the makeshift medical hut Mr. Konatsu had set up. He didn't seem to be in any particular rush, and trailed behind as he continued to walk at a leisurely pace. The rain didn't bother him one bit, sheltered as he was behind his strange battle clothes or _dogi_ or whatever it was.

As they entered, Konatsu raised his head from the table where he had set out most of the medical equipment. Most of it was beyond Lin Ke's training or experience. She had been well trained in the preparation of herbal medicines (and poisons, though Pink was her superior there), and in some holistic remedies as well, and she had even picked up and learned how to use some modern city-type equipment over the last year. Coming back from Japan had proven a golden opportunity to look into the sort of things people learned in modern medical schools; she was much more interested in the outside world in that respect than her twin sister was. But the things Konatsu had unpacked…

"Ah!" Konatsu said, motioning them over while he retrieved a few things from the table. "Tatewaki-san! These must be the children you found."

Behind Lin Ke, Kuno nodded half heartedly.

"They've been very quiet and well behaved," he observed. Even Lin Ke could see what he was inferring: 'they probably don't have the Madness Disease.'

Lin Ke led the two children over to Konatsu, while he told his comrade (this 'Tatewaki-san') to wait by the door. The brother, who was walking on his own, boldly approached Konatsu and asked what was happening; he could see many of the wounded lying nearby on the floor with some quickly salvaged dry blankets. Unfortunately, as Lin Ke had learned herself, Konatsu didn't speak any proper Chinese. She answered instead, explaining that the man was a doctor.

It helped that Konatsu had taken his helmet off, and thus offered people a human face to look at instead of a frankly rather unnerving triad of red orbs set against a near-black featureless mask. Konatsu immediately showed the child what he had in his hand: it was one of the strange diagnosis 'microchips' that Lin Ke had seen him use before. Holding the chip up to the boy's finger, it made a tiny prick, just enough to draw less than a drop of blood. He then did the same to the girl in Lin Ke's arms.

"Ok-ay," he said, speaking in Japanese, which Lin Ke was mostly fluent in. "Get them into something dry and warm while I check this."

She nodded, and led the two to a corner where she helped them out of their cold and wet clothes. There wasn't much to wear, so they would have to make do with some scavenged adult clothes. Drying them off, Lin Ke took a moment to look back at Konatsu. He had inserted the chips into some sort of computer, and he was talking softly into the head phone he had taken out of his helmet.

She had her cell phone in a hidden pocket, but Lin Ke knew it wasn't working. Somehow, it was being jammed or interfered with. It wouldn't even start up, though she knew the batteries were almost fully charged. Yet these people… they seemed to have no problem running their phones and the like. What was going on? Were they the ones who had scrambled her cell phone? The Amazons certainly wouldn't be capable of it.

"Lin Ke," the boy interrupted her thought, and she turned to smile reassuringly at him.

"What is it?"

"What's going on?"

He had to ask a question she couldn't answer!

"I'm not entirely sure," she replied, resisting tacking on an 'over' to the end of the sentence. It was easier to do when Pin Ke wasn't around. She looked the boy in the eyes, and then did the same for his sister. "Just sit quietly and wait. These people are going to take us someplace safe."

Both nodded; they were tired and cold, and probably couldn't have put up a lot of fuss or resistance even if they had wanted to. She knew them, though not terribly well, since she had babysat them a few times when she was younger. She noticed the boy looking around, and felt a pang of grief. He was looking for his parents, and she knew they weren't here.

"Everything will be all right, I promise." She stood up, and quickly headed over to Konatsu.

"Is they…?" she began to ask, switching to Japanese again.

"They're fine," Konatsu said, with palpable relief. Lin Ke wondered, then, what they would have done if they hadn't been 'fine'?

"It seems no one in the village was directly exposed…" he mused, and sat down on the edge of the table, looking over most of the wounded. Everything that could be done for them had been. Lin Ke had let Konatsu and Shampoo do most of the work while she ran errands for them, gathering blankets, cleaning up messes, changing clothes, keeping watch over the injured… She'd been able to make a few more bowls of anti-toxin for those suffering from the poison glade, too, which allowed her feel better for leading them into it in the first place.

After a short while, he turned to her. "Can you find Shampoo, please?"

Lin Ke bit back the urge to reject the request. Instead she silently nodded, and watched as Konatsu walked off to talk with the 'Tatewaki-san' person near the entrance. Lin Ke slipped out, and headed for the outhouse. Knocking on one of the walls (it only had half the normally required compliment) she stole a quick look, just quick enough to confirm that no one was using the 'facilities.'

She looked around, and soon saw a muddy footprint. To her knowledge, no one else had been out around back here, so chances were good that it belonged to Shampoo. Following it and another in the mud nearby, Lin Ke soon saw a dark shape of the sort she now identified as belonging to Ranma's soldiers. Like with Konatsu, this one had its helmet off, and by the long violet hair folded up behind its head, it had to be _her_.

Shampoo sat alone, her back against a tree and her face in her hands.

It occurred to Lin Ke then, for the first time, that Shampoo could actually be crying. She froze, unsure whether to announce she was nearby, or to try and take the situation in. Amazon women, as a rule, didn't really cry. Not out of sadness, rarely in pain, usually only to manipulate or trick men, who were then considered foolish for falling for it. Lin Ke had seen some of that, for the first time, when she and her sister had attacked Ranma and Shampoo in Nerima.

"Shan Pu," Lin Ke called out, walking over slowly to give her time to compose herself.

"What do you want?" the Amazon girl snapped, not turning her head.

Lin Ke squatted down nearby under the same tree. Shampoo made no effort to hide herself. She had obviously been crying, and she looked… terrible. Even when poisoned and trapped in a cage of thorny vines, with the walls dripping acid, she hadn't looked so haggard or so beaten.

"What?" Shampoo hissed. "You want to gloat? Huh?"

"No," Lin Ke lied. A part of her did want to gloat. She hated Shampoo, simply hated her, even now. And she hated the Amazons, too.

"You want to pity me then?" Shampoo's voice dripped venom. It was as if being pitied was worse than being mocked.

Lin Ke shook her head again.

Shampoo seemed surprised by this, and she paused for a second, before guessing, "Konatsu sent you?"

Lin Ke's expression alone confirmed it. Shampoo laughed dryly and ran a gloved hand through her hair, wiping back the bangs that normally fell over her forehead. She seemed to struggle, inside, before closing her eyes and sighing.

"It… it's regrettable… we never…" Shampoo shook her head, regaining control of her voice. "We never found your parents. I… it must be hard for you."

It was one little sentence. And it was more sympathy than Lin Ke had believed Shampoo ever capable of. To her, Shampoo had always been this heartless, unforgiving girl. Maybe Pin Ke had deserved a little roughing up after what she did, but even after Shampoo had learned that they were twins, and that Lin Ke had done nothing to her… she had still beaten them both up, many, many times, simply out of principle. How often had she tried to explain that she hadn't done anything wrong? How often had she tried to explain things, somehow believing that Shampoo wasn't acting out of malice, but out of a genuine misunderstanding?

"Was your father…?" Lin Ke started to ask, but Shampoo shook her head.

"No," she replied. "I talked him into staying… somewhere safe. Mu Tzu's mother is there, too."

Lin Ke felt, then, that the moment was ripe to ask the big question.

"Shan Pu… why is this happening to us?"

Shampoo labored over her next few words.

"I… I can't say," but she did give some clarification. "But this isn't the Amazon Tribe's fault. They are victims, too."

It wasn't much of an answer, but Lin Ke could tell it was probably all she'd get. At least for now.

"What do we do now?" she cautiously asked.

"You leave," Shampoo replied, sepia eyes hard and overflowing with the desire for vengeance. "I fight."

"I meant more… what are we going to do," Lin Ke clarified. "Now that our homes are both… gone…?"

Shampoo almost immediately deflated.

"I…" She frowned, more sad than angry. "I don't know…"

* * *

Zraz's consciousness floated through The Mind, swam at the periphery of experience, and peered into a spectrum of a hundred eyes. It was overwhelming, like trying to hold a waterfall in one's hands, but The Mind was always there in the background – watching, waiting, guiding. Zraz felt like an infant learning to slither, holding onto an adult's hand. No doubt an Ethereal could manage on its own without much aid from The Mind, but Zraz could not.

He could perceive the location of his terror units and his other soldiers, spread out over the blanket of the planet below. It was a God's Eye View of things, created through the perceptions and experiences of more than a hundred individuals. As Commander, he was privy to it, all the better to direct things and evaluate the situation. The Mind preferred to Guide, and not to Command, at least on the individual level.

The humans…

YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO

"I do."

* * *

Face down in the mud, Akane tried desperately to control her breathing and keep down the rising tide of panic. Throwing oneself to the ground like she had went against years of martial arts training, but bracing oneself was of little use if you were about to be hit by a tiny chunk of the sun moving fifty times the speed of a bullet. A chunk of wall, solid stone, shattered like flash frozen glass behind her. At the same time an explosion somewhere out of sight shook the ground and rattled the teeth in her jaw.

"Come on!" she hissed to herself, looking up from her prone position and taking aim at the general direction of the enemy. Squeezing the trigger, a beam of coherent laser light crossed the distance of forty meters and missed its target by several feet. A tree several hundred feet away took the hit instead, slicing a decades old branch cleanly off.

'Focus!' she mentally kicked herself. 'Focus!!'

Inching forward and behind the closest cover, she steadied her rifle and fired again, this time at the wall the aliens had taken cover behind. She fired twice, slicing into the stone, hoping to hit the alien behind it by sheer volume of fire. There was another explosion, and a building near the alien position shattered like a house of cards built around a cherry bomb.

No shit the LZ had been hot.

The HWPs had drawn fire almost from the moment they rolled or hovered out of the Avenger. Akane had been fired at before in practice, but… not _really_ fired at. Not **fired** at, as in fired at by live ammunition that could disintegrate an arm or leg or burn clean through you. Tucking in her legs and steeling her nerves, Akane remembered her training, why she was here, who she was here with… Getting into a crouch, she fired another quick snap shot and started to move towards one of the buildings.

Dōngmenkou had been mostly intact when they landed, but that status was rapidly deteriorating. XCOM generally tried to eschew use of high explosives during terror sites, or anywhere civilians are likely to be present. The aliens, however, had fewer compunctions in that regard, and XCOM was responding in kind, since Intel didn't find it likely any civilians were left in the area. Another alien grenade went off around the side of the building, tearing masonry apart and instantly turning wood into ash.

"CHRYSSALID!!" Winther yelled over their squad-comm, and Akane could see his tracer fire lancing out at the dark shape as it slipped out from an abandoned building. It was fast – martial artist fast – and she couldn't see much in the way of details. Just a blur of black and white.

"Torch!" Akane cried; a warning of what was to come. Even before she said it, even before she had really seen the Chryssalid, she already had the M14 thermate grenade in her left hand. Pulling out the pin on the red cylinder, she popped the trigger and tossed it underhand towards the dark creature ahead of her.

It flew through the air, twisting and turning, as she backed off, firing rapidly at the oncoming Chryssalid. By pure good luck she nicked its arm, but there was no spray of gore as the limb came off. The dark shape kept coming, needle thin legs leaping, before disappearing into a sea of fire. The M14 TH3 grenade went off perfectly, just as it hit the ground, filling the world around it with molten iron and orange-blue flame.

Then, a second later, the black body of the creature stumbled forward, parts of the hard outer shell glowing white and red. Greenish goo seeped out from cracks in it – like the superheated insides were bubbling out through the joints and weak spots. Amazingly, it wasn't quite dead yet, even as it dribbled bits of its insides down its legs. It stumbled several more feet, vicious crab-clawed hands snapping, before a trio of plasma blasts sent it screaming to the ground.

"Tendo!" Winther said from nearby, snapping her out of staring at the boiling, ruined corpse.

"Right!" She responded, shouldering her weapon smartly and following behind him, watching the squad's rear quarter. They were the fire support team for Hotel Squad and Lieutenant Gottwald. While Echo and Foxtrot secured the southern side of the town, including the railway station, Hotel and Golf were tasked with pushing into the main road and the market. Bravo, meanwhile, would push in from the north, and Charlie and Alpha would cut off the aliens from the northwest. When the aliens pulled out, those two squads would be in position to pick them off out in the open.

Her squad leader was easy to follow in his ARES Powered Armor; he towered over any normal person in personal armor. The heavy plasma rifle in his delivered death in just the same sort of terrifying package the aliens were so used to dealing out. Akane's laser carbine seemed almost toy-like by comparison, but it was more than lethal against the Snakemen they were up against here. The Chryssalids were a bit more of a problem, though…

"Tango!" Asghar Khan, their silent and somber point man, ducked into a crouch and immediately fired down the length of the straight main road. He and Squaddie Lohse were both armed with medium plasma rifles, the standard weapon of choice for most missions and most personnel. Generally it was only against the weaker alien races that XCOM used the laser rifle as standard, and only against Mutons or Ethereals that they used all-heavies.

An inhuman howl echoed down the street, and return fire stitched out, burning glass craters in the muddy unpaved road. Khan backed away, and ducked back to the cover of the side of the building they had emerged behind. Firing around the corner, exposing only his weapon and part of his hand, he pulled back again. More alien fire rained down.

"Prox!" He called, reaching down to his waist and one of the combat pockets there. Akane joined him; she had the most grenades of all sorts of any of them. Together, they tossed their grenades out into the road and around the side of the building. Hiding back under cover, Akane saw the Sergeant pull back his fist and bury it into the building they were taking refuge behind. His armored fist plowed clean through the wall, and he pulled it down with the sort of power-enhanced lack of effort one would expect from Ranma or Ryouga.

Kicking open the last bits of wall and making an in-promptu door, Winther led them through and into the building itself. It had once been someone's home and castle, now it was a mess, even before they had caved the wall in. Motioning them with his hand, "one" that way; "two" that way; "three" cover us from here, they advanced. A few seconds later, two thunderous explosions outside the building gave proof of the proximity grenades' effectiveness.

Creeping up to one of the windows, Akane saw one of the enemy creatures hiding behind an old car, parked at the side of the road. It was orange colored, though much of its scaly underside was brown with mud, and it carried a rifle that seemed a hell of a lot bigger than Akane's own. She watched for a second, as it peeked out from behind cover, looking towards where they had tried to emerge before.

Raising her weapon and taking careful aim, feeling as if she had virtually all the time in the world, Akane licked her lips. Staring straight down the iron sights of her rifle, she squeezed her index finger down on the trigger. There was basically no natural recoil from a laser weapon, only a little push from the escaping gasses in the barrel. At the last second, her aim went a little low, and the beam of light cut into the Snakeman's throat, dwelled there for a half second, and then cut through everything in front of the spine.

It dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.

"My first kill?" it came out as more a question than a statement. Her blood was pumping, she was as excited as she had ever been, but there was something missing that she had expected: that exultant rush of enjoyment and endorphins. She felt a sense of accomplishment, of definite pride and some satisfaction, but not a lot of joy.

My First Kill.

There wasn't much time to think about it anyway. With the death of one of their own, the aliens turned on them, and Akane suddenly realized that she hadn't warned anyone that she had sighted an enemy and was about to take a shot. Given the shot-counter-shot nature of this sort of fighting, it was SOP to say 'contact' or 'tango' or 'sighted.' She ducked, and winced as a plasma blast blew a gaping hole in the wall. It wasn't much for cover.

"Sorry!" she hastily apologized, as the rest of the team took firing position and began to open up on the aliens. They weren't totally outflanked yet, and seemed determined to hold onto their positions.

"Movement," Lohse shouted from deeper in the building. "Eight hours!"

That was behind and to their left!

"I'm on it!" Akane spun, kept herself pressed against the wall, and tried to sight on whatever it was that had nearly gotten around them. She saw it: black and fast, scuttling by the window in the back. Firing into the wall, punching tiny laser light holes in it, this time Akane didn't forget.

"Tango! Chryssalid!" She yelled, continuing to fire along the path she was sure it had taken. Squaddie Lohse, instead, took aim at the back of the building where they had come in. Sure enough, the Chryssalid rounded the corner and smashed through the wall. It was quite wide, but just not enough, forcing the savage creature to tear and smash aside part of the wall with its clawed arm.

In this moment's distraction, Janis Lohse planted a ball of burning plasma square it its chest. The Chryssalid hissed, a high pitched squeal that hurt the ears and reminded Akane of a car burning its tires by accelerating too fast. She added her own fire, too, shooting it twice in the chest and once in its ugly face. This close, she could see it clearly: the Chryssalid was a bipedal mass of black and black-red chitin-like armor, snapping claws, and vicious spikes. The strange head almost seemed to be making a face like an insane grin, with giant square teeth and tiny purple eyes. It reminded her not just of a crab, but of a horseshoe crab.

Another blast of plasma, and its face mostly disappeared.

"Bravo Squad's made contact!" Winther announced over the comm. "Let's go! Let's go!"

Leaving the mostly ruined and pockmarked cover of the building, they advanced down the road. The aliens were dividing their fire and attention now, and the opposition was both distracted and pulling back. Another Snakeman got caught out in the open, and swiftly shot down. Akane hunkered down, keeping her body low and her target profile small, as she fired down the street.

She glanced down at the motion sensor display, and saw green dots – friendlies.

Gradually, the hectic back and forth fire died down and they advanced mostly unopposed. A second after she started to relax and imagine that the battle was over, a tremendous explosion – the largest so far by far – landed in the center of the Dōngmenkou marketplace. Shielding her face from the flash of light and the hailstorm of debris, nearly bowled over by the overpressure shockwave, she stared into the charred maelstrom. Everything had been leveled, including two nearby buildings and the market itself.

Of her own squad, Sergeant Winther was fine, and covering the rest. Lohse had been knocked on her ass, and so had Squaddie Khan. Both were slowly getting back on their feet.

"Khan," Winther called, taking a few steps closet to the man, more to cover him from any fire than to help him up. "You alright?"

"Just a bit… rattled, Sergeant," the squad point man shook his head. "Damn Golden BBs."

Akane recognized the name. 'Golden BBs' were slang for Blaster Bombs.

"They're falling back," Winther told them the news, since out of the four only he was keyed into the command level comms. "Feretti and Hanley seem to be having a fun time picking them apart as they run."

"Ben-Solomon's boys always get the easy jobs," Lohse said with a laugh.

"All right!" Winther's went back to giving orders instead of commentary. "Lohse, you're with me. We're going to finish securing the road into town. Tendo, Khan, police the wounded. You have four minutes."

"There's Gottwald and Hotel Squad," Lohse added, as four dusty figures stepped out into the open on the other side of the smashed marketplace. Looking up, Akane saw the sun peaking out from behind the clouds.

The rain had stopped.

* * *

"Lieutenant Stirling! Look at this!"

The heavily armored figure kneeled down, staring at the odd sight. He'd never seen such a young looking woman or man with such strange white hair. Intel hadn't indicated that it was likely they'd find any civvies in Dōngmenkou itself (they would probably be a few in the countryside), but it looked like they were just a little off in their estimate. The poor kids had probably been knocked out for later experimentation or something, which would explain why the aliens had stripped them of their clothes.

Stirling stood back up, carrying the pale-skinned and white haired young woman in his arms.

"They look good to move," he said, and the other soldier picked up the gaunt young man. "Let's get them out of here."


	60. The Twilight of the Amazons VI

Konatsu saw them from afar and gently bit his lip as he counted their numbers. The squad level chatter had died down, leaving a discomfiting silence. Just out in the open, he could see at least a dozen Amazons heading towards them. Unlike the ones before, these had thrown aside their weapons, and the ones in the front seemed slightly misshapen and bloated. Konatsu was no fool. He had studied his xenophysiology, even aside from the information psionically jammed into his head, and he knew what that meant.

Chryssalids.

The nightmare creatures would lay an egg in a victim, after injecting him or her with a cocktail deadly venom. The poisons would warp and disfigure the victim, making it tougher and driving it into a rabid state where it would seek out and kill or cripple others. Inside the host, the Chryssalid egg would gestate and grow, rapidly devouring and absorbing nearby tissues and organs. Only the venom induced frenzy would keep the host from dying in the three to six minutes it took for the egg to turn into a near mature Chryssalid. Being eaten alive; having your humanity stolen… it was no small wonder that Chryssalids were so universally feared and loathed by all who encountered them.

Behind the gravid hosts, dark shapes moved through the tall grass, followed at the last by slower, lighter colored shapes trying to keep pace. There were a lot of them. Given that he could probably only see half their true numbers from this far off, Konatsu had to assume that there were at least twenty two, maybe twenty four Chryssalids, and eight to ten Snakemen. It wasn't good odds.

Then again, when were they ever technically good odds?

He kept the commentary to himself and passed on his estimate of the enemy's numbers. Ryu had traded shots with one of their scouts just a few minutes ago; that had been the first warning. The squads had scrambled to their positions, most of them behind defilade down on the ground, two under well prepared concealment. Konatsu, however, had found himself on the roof of the building where the wounded were housed. It did offer a good vantage point, but it also left him relatively exposed to return fire.

"Ok, everyone!" Ranma chose that moment, just when Konatsu had started to dwell on the worst aspects of where he had been assigned, to address the two squads in a confident and lively tone.

"Listen up!" he said, and Konatsu shook his head, because somehow Ranma's mood was infectious. "This is usually the part where either me or the lost boy say something cool, like 'duty is a mountain' or, you know, like in Braveheart… Wait, how did that speech go? Everybody dies or something…?"

Muffled thumps reverberated amid the countryside.

"Brave-heart?" That would be Ryouga's voice. "What are you talking about?"

"It's a movie," Mousse supplied, helpfully. Everyone was already firing downrange, Konatsu included; no one bothered to wait – they all knew what to do anyway.

"What does a movie have to do with…?"

Ranma groaned in unabashed exasperation. "Nevermind! I want to say: let's just stay calm, stick to the plan, and we'll all be eating lunch in that alien battleship a few miles south! And when we get back to base, we're _all_ watching Braveheart, you got that?"

There were a few more distant thumps, and then a big one, tossing a spray of red and green chunks into the air. Most of those explosions were Claymore anti-personnel mines, but it seemed one very unlucky Chryssalid had found a buried anti tank mine as well. Most of its torso spun, intact, through the air like a bloody pinwheel. The enemy wasn't just cutting through a muddy field, it was cutting through a 'claymore, improvised explosive, and landmine strewn' muddy field, and a meat grinder that the enemy's scout had been scared off before identifying.

Mousse snickered deviously in grim satisfaction. "And they told us Chryssalids don't fly…"

Konatsu concentrated on taking careful aim and firing, rather than trying to assuage his nervousness with banter. Lying behind a rough bulwark of bricks carried and set up on the roof, sniper rifle in hand, he waited, trying to pick off those aliens not moving evasively. The sudden silent kill was in his nature and his training, after all, and there was a certain terrible beauty to it that he, as a _shinobi_, could appreciate. The problem was that, despite the carnage caused downfield by mines and other traps, their actual weapons were of rather limited effectiveness.

A well aimed, and lucky, bullet hit a crouched Chryssalid square in what passed for its face. The creature flinched, and Konatsu was sure he had hit, but the alien simply reoriented itself and looked around, trying to find the human that had thrown the high speed but ineffective little metal pebble at it. The ninja genius hunkered down low, trying to disappear. The Chryssalid in his scopes ducked down and then poked its head up again, looking to the left and right.

Before he could ask for assistance from Shampoo and her heavy laser (the only really effective anti-Chryssalid weapon they had) a flash of light cut into the dark shelled monster. It whirled in the direction of what had dared to cause it pain, or in this case cut deeply into its torso and arm. Konatsu shot at it again, missed, and then again, hitting it in the body. It turned and started to run, only to fall when the beam from before cut off one of its legs.

Immediately searching for another target, Konatsu found one of the Snakemen heading for cover behind a large rock - this was more the sort of target he wanted. He fired and missed again, unable to hit the creature before it got to safety. Like the others in the two squads, Konatsu could be very deadly in close to medium ranges with a firearm, if only by virtue of his speed and strength giving him a steady aim and opportunity to strike. This advantage faded away rapidly at longer ranges.

They had thinned out the enemy, but now things were about to get hairy…

"Fall back!" Ranma's sounded anything but blithe this time.

Konatsu fired one last shot, and then the aliens started to zero in on him. Burning plasma screamed through the air, and he rolled away and off the roof. Checking his ammo, and mentally going over the rest of his gear, Konatsu headed towards the only place he could fall back to. It was the new extraction point, right next to the triage building which still held the wounded.

They would hold those two objectives, or die trying.

* * *

They were making good progress.

Akane's armored boot sloshed through one of the many muddy puddles that pockmarked the south face of the road leading to the Amazon village. The terrain here was rougher than it was on the north face, and it got worse the further south you went, until it merged into the jutting rock faces of the mountains flanking Jyusenkyou. Up ahead of her, one of the hover-type HWPs led the way, scanning for threats or ambushes.

There was still significant alien opposition in the fields around the town, and they were often smart enough to ignore the spearpoint HWPs and snipe at the smaller but more vulnerable individuals behind it. Occasionally, a blaster bomb came down on their heads as well, at which point everyone had to scatter and drop to the ground, and hope that it either missed due to poor guidance, or that when it went off (always where someone had just been standing a second or so ago) no one was too badly hurt.

Being whacked by a BB meant there was an alien spotter somewhere nearby, at which point everyone searched for the critter, and when it was found; relayed the position to the Arty Ops Squads. It usually wasn't long before the alien was mind controlled and used to counter-recon enemy positions, directing allied blaster bombs to hit enemy positions. When that happened, Akane could assume, the aliens did exactly what XCOM troopers did: they hid, scattered, or jumped to the ground, praying to whatever gods they had that the bomb didn't vaporize them.

It was grueling, nerve wracking work, but they were making good progress.

Naturally, the armored elements, meaning those in powered armor, led the advance. Those few with flying powered armor utilized it sparingly, not wanting to stay overly exposed in the air for too long. Most of those guys were up north, buzzing the numerous little farm houses and the like in the countryside there, and guarding the advance's flank.

"Tango!" Sergeant Winther yelled, firing as he advanced, heavy plasma rifle making one profound philosophical argument after another. Two were sufficient. The dark shape collapsed with a screeching howl.

"Nailed it," he confirmed, and motioned for the rest of the squad to follow as they continued. They kept low, as the aliens still took long distance pot shots at them, most of which flew overhead. Akane kept her focus on the north and west. Hotel Squad was up ahead and to the north, closer to the road. Also visible, but further away, was the tracked HWP, the one armed with a laser cannon mount.

To the west, she could just see the outline of the Amazon village. It was, in true Spartan tradition, wall-less, and looming behind it all was the four story tall bulk of the landed alien battleship. Akane had never developed much of a liking for the Amazons she had met over the years, and for pretty much all of them, the dislike was mutual. They were a proud, insular people, either killing or assimilating those they couldn't subdue or subordinate; strong unbowed female rivals were either murdered or driven off, and strong males were forced (or tricked) into an indentured form of marriage. Granted, Akane had never been privy to the details, but that was the sort of impression and image she had developed over the years.

Yet, they were caretakers and preservers of ancient and powerful martial arts traditions, dating back over two thousand years. Which was why, as a person, Akane found them rather despicable, but as a martial artist, she couldn't help but respect and even admire them. Given several hundred years of martial artist rule, what society wouldn't end up a little… skewed by it? The thought of someone like Genma or Happosai making the laws, simply because they ended up powerful and influential in the Art, was a scary prospect.

Suddenly, her foot buried a little too deeply in a muddy pool, interrupting her thoughts and her steady march towards the village. Extraditing her boot with a wet 'plop' sound, she took another step before something in the back of her mind triggered, and a chill ran down her spine. It was as if she had stepped into a morgue, or a grave: there was that intangible feeling of death, and of some unseen menace. This wasn't normal fear or apprehension.

Could it have been… _sakkijutsu_?

_Sakkijutsu_ was a warning sense that the most elite martial artists developed, allowing them to do insane things like catch arrows fired at them from behind while blindfolded. There was some sort of psionic aspect to it, since UNETCO taught that powerful and well trained psi-ops could 'anticipate' enemy attacks by subconsciously reading their thoughts, or by picking up on 'stray' thoughts around them. These were jumbled psionic signals that couldn't, yet, be consciously sorted through. Only the primitive, survival based part of the mind seemed to be able to sort through what was harmless and what was a threat, all in a split second. As afraid as Akane was of being wrong, she was even more afraid of being right, and not doing something about it.

"Hey, I think we should stop or something," Akane said, and tried to sound more convincing. "I think we're walking into some sort of trap, Sergeant!"

Ahead of them, Sergeant Winthers stopped and held up a fist, motioning the rest of them to do the same. He didn't turn around, but he did ask, "A trap?"

"Yes, sir." Akane tacked on the sir there without even thinking, just trying to say as much as possible as quickly as possible. "I've got… well, a bad feeling, but it isn't just a feeling…"

"Hotel," Winther responded, but not to her. He was talking to Lieutenant Gottwald and Hotel Squad. "Golf here. Recommend you proceed with caution. Repeat: proceed with caution. … Yes, that's right. Right."

He lowered his arm, and started to walk again, slowly.

"I hope you're wrong about this feeling of yours," Squaddie Lohse commented.

"Me too," Akane replied, but a part of her was sort of hoping she was right. Out of all her martial arts friends (or rather: out of all Ranma's martial arts friends), she had perhaps the weakest _sakkijutsu_. Part of the problem was that she really had never been in any life or death sorts of situations before Ranma came to Nerima, and even afterwards, she was rarely in real direct danger. Without that sort of impulse, a real _sakkijutsu_ could never develop. It literally took repeated exposure to danger to learn to recognize it, even subconsciously. If she was right this time, it meant she was getting better and improving as a martial artist…

"Holy…! TANGO! TANGO! CHRYSSALID!!"

Her expectations turned, instantly, into shock and horror as Winther suddenly pivoted, firing. Ahead of them, one of Hotel Squad's troopers seemed to be struggling. Through the tall grass, Akane could see a claw rising up, clamped around the man's upper body armor. Hotel Squad became, in that moment, a free for all. Everyone started firing down at the ground. Yet another Chryssalid erupted out of the muddy soil, leaping at Lieutenant Gottwald from the side and bowling him over. A third Chryssalid also burst out from cover, where it had been waiting with uncharacteristic patience, heaving for the ambushed group of soldiers.

Thinking quickly, so fast it was almost instinctive, Akane retrieved an M14 thermate grenade and threw it, low and fast, into the ground around the middle of Hotel Squad. At that range, three Chryssalids (or more) against four soldiers meant they would almost certainly end up with seven or more Chryssalids. It was better to take their chances with the fire. Her grenade exploded spectacularly, lighting up the entire area. The crab-like aliens hissed and snarled and panicked as they caught fire, momentarily forgetting about their targets and trying instead to extinguish themselves or run away from what was hurting them.

Golf Squad showed them no mercy, and while they fired at the creatures, Akane turned and threw another grenade at a suspicious patch of tall grass. A blossom of fire cleared it out nicely, and two more Chryssalids hissed and ran towards her. Plasma fire tore them to ribbons, and even blew one inside out as its innards superheated to the point where even its unearthly-tough shell shattered. Another 'lid, this one near the fire but unburned, seemed to come to the conclusion that it was pointless trying to hide, and instead took a great leap towards Golf Squad (and away from the fire). A green bolt of sunfire hit it from the side as the hovertank entered the fray.

"Captain!" The Sergeant yelled, plasma rifle spitting concentrated death to his right and then in front of him, as the aliens seemed to come out of the proverbial woodwork. "We need Psi Support!"

Akane concentrated on firing and backpedaling. She caught sight of a trio of Chryssalids coming in at the same pace – immediately letting her rifle fall to her side, and retrieved an alien grenade and a thermate one, tossing them both with enough accuracy that they landed in front of and behind the alien trio. For once, the incendiary explosion was completely drowned out amid the conflagration; the alien grenade's explosion dwarfed it, bathing the entire area in a tiny solar flare.

She caught sight of another Chryssalid wrestling with one of its comrades, pincher claws snapping and slicing. A blaster bomb came down nearby right on top of another of the aliens, gibbing it into a million unrecognizable chunks and blowing away several tons of muddy earth. It was the heart of madness, with everything killing everything, and Akane had to bite her lip to keep focused and calm.

She listened to the comm.

There were no sounds of panic among the XCOM soldiers - barely even raised voices. Squaddie Lohse reported her weapon usage as a warning to those nearby, indicating 'engaging Chryssalid with grenade' or 'falling back and loading ATX.' Khan, armed with a deadly effective medium plasma rifle, reported his position and his targets: 'Wounded Chryssalid neutralized. Moving to team three hours.' Winther was their armored anchor, drawing enemy fire now that the Snakemen were organizing a counter attack and picking off the toughest targets. He said where to go, what to do, and people moved – even Akane herself, without much thinking about it.

An alien plasma blast hit the ground nearby, leaving a streaked crater of black-green glass behind. She lobbed another grenade, high, and got off a crouching snap shot before it landed. The laser beam missed the aliens, but the explosion at least rattled them, if not badly wounding at least one. They hadn't seen the grenade, and one of them had just kept firing at full auto even as it landed nearly in its lap. Another blaster bomb added to the roar and tumult of combat.

Hearing a crashing sound, almost like a car hitting a fire hydrant, she whirled in its direction and saw the plasma armed hovertank crash to the ground. A Chryssalid had its claws sunk into the gap between the turret and the disk like base. Another of the creatures hung onto the side despite being on fire. A second later the hovertank sputtered, disappeared behind the grass, and exploded. 'Judicious Self-Destruct,' most likely. She couldn't see, but she hoped it had also taken out the two Chryssalids nearby.

Moving towards it, keeping her head low and almost scrambling on all fours, she saw one of the dark-shelled creatures stand up. It was missing its arm, but like a terrestrial crab, the wound didn't seem to be life threatening. Akane fired, ducked her head as a grenade-explosives warning went off on her HUD (the actual explosion being several meters away), and then pumped another beam into the staggering and probably concussed Chryssalid. It started for her after the first hit, the remaining black claw snapping wildly.

She kept firing, desperate now. A beam cut into its chest, burning past alien organic armor, but it kept running. She could see the head – the ever smiling 'face' – move back. It was a 'false face,' like some animals had, and beneath it were two centipede like jaws lined with teeth. She kept her aim on the body, doubting she could hit it in the head and not wanting to risk missing more than she had to. Finally one beam hit it in the upper leg and it stumbled, the muscle there shredded and burned beyond repair. Another beam cut into the main body, and then another. At last, it fell.

Slowly getting back on her feet, Akane wiped a bit of mud off her T-7A2 laser rifle and looked around. Things seemed to be dying down just a little. She saw a smoky contrail as a missile streaked downrange and exploded, engulfing yet more of the countryside in cleansing fire. It was Squaddie Lohse's work, using the MK-600 missile with her M-144 ATX launcher. The missile's two kilogram thermate warhead could spread its special brand of 6,500 centigrade death over one hundred and eighty cubic feet.

It was among the last few shots of the firefight.

Soon, all that was left was the clean up. A handful of mind controlled aliens remained – two Chryssalids and a Snakeman. Since Elerium was expensive and could only be salvaged from the aliens themselves, it fell to the laser armed soldiers to give 'last rites' to mind controlled aliens not slated to stay at the roach motel back at the base (aka 'alien containment'). Second generation laser weapons only used a tiny fraction of elerium compared to the hefty clips of the stuff plasma weapons required (and first gen lasers used none). It was thus smart in terms of conservation to perform the executions with neat, clean laser beams.

Akane fired into the first of the creatures. It stood still, out in the open, and not a single shot of hers missed. It took a little while to finish the two Chryssalids. The Snakeman died after a single shot to the side of the head. Job done, Akane lowered her weapon and let herself relax a fraction. She glanced over to where the remains of Hotel Squad stood over their dead and turned away almost immediately. It was fortunate that she couldn't smell anything outside her personal armor and helmet. The stench of burning flesh would have probably turned her stomach inside out.

"Tendo."

"Sergeant?" She asked, facing the man. She hadn't heard him walk up to her. It was amazing that such heavy and bulky looking armor could move so lightly and quietly. She'd imagined that it would be all servomotors and generators, whirring and humming, but it was as quiet as a ghost. A seven foot tall armored ghost.

"No one saw that coming but you," he said, and his helmet moved in a small nod of approval. "I think you've got good instincts, Squaddie. Listen to 'em."

She nodded back, not knowing just what to say.

Walking through the fire and still smoldering terrain, XCOM pushed onward towards the heart of the enemy. Akane felt a grim determination coalesce around her heart, and the sight of burning corpses unnerved her no more than seeing charred earth or glassy craters. Most amazing of all, she felt almost safe surrounded by her team mates, despite the obvious danger all around her.

'No matter how many times they counter attack,' she thought, stepping over the carbonized remains of one of the fallen aliens. 'We'll keep moving forward!'

The Amazon village was just over the next rise.

* * *

The situation wasn't exactly what one would call 'favorable.'

Everyone was down to using their weapons of last resort: their individual special techniques and abilities. Shampoo, alone among them in her lack of a long or medium range technique, nonetheless was the most effective, putting her skill with the T-8A1 Advanced Tactical "heavy" Laser to good use. The weapon was getting hot from the repeated firings, and wafts of visible steam were rising from the sides of the barrel.

The two squads had assembled a rough embankment to their left flank, and with the building to the right, it offered a relatively workable makeshift fallback point. Visible in the sky, she could see a Skyranger craft carefully making its approach, VTOL engines roaring like twin jets circling directly overhead. It was on final approach, and just like she could see it, the aliens could as well. The sight of it, the means by which their cornered prey might escape, only drove them more recklessly into overwhelming the two squad's position.

All around Shampoo, her peers were cutting loose with special techniques. Ranma had already unleashed the _Hiryu Shoten Ha_ twice now, the still twisting tornados having blown back or away the first Chryssalids to get close enough to jump. Now both he and Ryouga were firing _ki_ blasts non stop from both hands. The attacks were concussive and more than powerful enough to kill a regular human, but against the clawed alien monsters… It blew them back and away, but didn't seem to do any real lasting damage. Ryu's vacuum blades were likewise ineffective, though he compensated somewhat by spamming them like there was no tomorrow.

Mousse, Konatsu and Ukyou were in the second line of defense, filling the area in front of them and to the pressed sides with metal chaff and explosives. Mousse's fire based attack, the _Ikkatsu Kakudo Hou_, was especially effective. Konatsu's use of wires and bolo-like weapons, entangling an enemy so Mousse could burn it, was similarly impressive. Then there was Ukyou, exhausting herself by firing off her new _Kenran Hinode_ ki technique, and shooting sticky tempura goo at the enemy like she was some comic superhero. It wasn't bad enough that she had some semi-useful improvised techniques in her ridiculous food based martial art, but now she had a _ki_ attack, too? Ukyou, of all people, had something that even the greatest Amazon warriors had to struggle to attain?

Something even she, Shampoo, had not been able to develop?

It was infuriating!

She stood in the back, in a protected position with a good vantage point, with Kuno nearby in case anything managed to get past or around. Lin Ke and the other villagers were huddled just behind them, waiting for the Skyranger to land, screaming and praying and being otherwise useless in Shampoo's evaluation of the situation. Ranma's plan had been to fall back, draw them in, and then counterattack with the reinforcements aboard the Skyranger, but updrafts and the fact that the aliens were taking shots at the VTOL aircraft (a single heavy plasma would easily destroy an engine)… it was no wonder things were such a desperate mess.

She found herself once again thinking, briefly, about Ukyou… and realizing she was jealous. She, Shampoo, was actually jealous… and of that pancake flipping, cross dressing, crude, _Japanese_, hussy! She, the pride of the Amazon village, the greatest of her generation! It just hadn't really set in until now, seeing Ukyou use the technique in desperate combat.

'Damnit! Damnit damnit!' Shampoo hissed in her mind. Dumping several kilowatts of energy into an alien's face, splattering it like a melon, didn't even help her mood. 'I'm not just a soldier; I'm a martial artist, too!'

'And now I sound like that kitchen destroyer!' she realized. 'How did this happen…? What good is there to being an Amazon if… if… just, what point is there, if I'm cursed to play third string with an idiot like Kuno? Damnit!!'

At that second, in midair, the back of the Skyranger opened wide. Shampoo chanced a brief upward glance. The ship had to be over a hundred feet up, still. Was someone going to jump? It was possible – powered armored individuals could easily weather the fall, and someone in flying powered armor could zip out easy as you please. Of course, doing so would leave them in midair and exposed to alien fire. It would take a real gung ho type to try it.

Sure enough, three figures emerged, jumping out of the swaying aircraft. None were large and bulky enough to be wearing powered armor, though. Right behind those three followed three more, these wearing the large armor Shampoo had expected. The last three dropped like rocks, but the first three were entirely different.

One actually seemed to float down to the ground. Another one, slightly larger in build, wielded a weapon even larger than the 10.5 kilogram heavy laser Shampoo carried. In fact, it looked even larger and heavier than the 26 kilo monster Mechem NTW-20 Mousse had long since used up his ammunition for and discarded. The third, a smaller framed warrior, sped down to the ground like a comet, firing all the while. Only when he touched the ground and vanished from sight did she grasp just how fast he really was.

Together with the three powered armored figures, the new comers took advantage of the cover given by India and Juliet squad's fierce defense to rip into the enemy. Before Shampoo's own eyes, two Chryssalids bounced upwards into the air, as if they had been hit by a _ki_ blast from below. The still slowly falling individual swept his arm to the side, and a razor thin wave lashed out like a whip. It cut one of the creatures cleanly in half and removed an arm and part of the upper body and shoulder from the other.

'A ki attack?' she marveled. She had heard of attacks like that: finely controlled and super-concentrated extensions of spiritual energy and mental power, but she had never seen them. No Amazon except possibly Cologne had ever seen anything like that. Whoever it was that had used the attack had to be an Elder of the sort that even the Amazons would respect.

Another of the reinforcements took aim with his rifle - in Shampoo's opinion less a 'rifle' and more a hand held cannon – and fired. A beam that was probably powerful enough to impale a main battle tank (or, for that matter, shoot a small UFO from the sky) disintegrated the lower body of a Chryssalid before sweeping into and across the ground, spraying a column of superheated steam and ash into the air.

Meanwhile, the third member of that unusual squad, the one quick on his feet, suddenly appeared up by Ukyou and Mousse and Konatsu. He held out weapons: three fresh medium plasma rifles. The three took them without a moment's hesitation, and contributed their own fire while Ranma and Ryouga zipped out of the way. No one in their two squads had as much experience with plasmas as they did with lasers and conventional arms. The sheer volume of fire, however, made up for any real lack of initial accuracy. A moment later, the delivery boy was handing one of the weapons to Kuno, and then to Ranma and Ryouga.

The tide turned, and it left in its wake death and destruction.

The Chryssalids all charged and died in an unrelenting hellstorm of plasma and mental energy. A lone Snakeman, his wits more about him, tried to escape. He didn't get very far. In what felt like moments (Shampoo's HUD chronometer disagreed) it was all over. The Skyranger began its descent unhindered, though at least one plasma blast had come close to grounding it for an undesired and unspecified amount of time.

"About time Dongchuan showed up and started to pull its weight!" Ranma turned on one of the nearby newcomers, seemingly happy to exchange one fight for another. "What the Hell took so long?"

One of the new arrivals obviously said something, as Ranma snickered at the reply.

"Is that so?" he asked, speaking on a different officer level frequency. "And people call me cocky! There's an English word I learned to describe someone like you, you know…"

"All right, you two," another voice interrupted, speaking over a band that encompassed (Shampoo assumed) all their squad comms. "Stow it. Romeo Squad: secure the area. Papa and Quebec, get those civvies aboard. The sooner they're out of here, the better."

"Sir!" Ranma responded (the only officer level response she could hear). "What about Juliet Squad, Colonel? And India?"

One of the men in powered armor stepped forward. He held a large weapon different from any plasma or laser weapon. Shampoo's psi-training reminded her that it was a Blaster Bomb launcher; used as pinpoint artillery. Next to the markings on his shoulder that identified his rank as that of Colonel, she could see a golden trio of stylized arrows. Given what Ranma had said, she could guess who this was: he was the Colonel of the smaller UNETCO base in Dongchuan, China.

"Sit down and take a break, soldier," the Colonel replied, looking from one member of Juliet squad to the other. "You kids can bloody well fight, that's for damn sure!"

While the late arrivals got to work, more than a few of Juliet and India squad took the opportunity to collapse or fall straight down to the ground, leaving back against a rock or even each other. The major _ki_ users were all spent, and Ukyou was hunched over trying to collect herself. Only Kuno and herself remained unscathed and unburdened by exhaustion, and the swordsman quickly headed for the company of his fellows in India Squad, probably to inquire as to what was going on. Shampoo was wondering the same thing, but first and foremost, she had one other thing to see to.

Walking slowly over to where the civilians were being carried, loaded or led into the Skyranger, Shampoo saw Lin Ke. She was standing by her sister, who had slept through most of the ordeal, only waking up when she had been moved out of the building. Pin Ke didn't recognize Shampoo's approach, not with her personal armor on, but Lin Ke did. She whispered something to her sister, and stood, following Shampoo as she walked a short distance away. Pin Ke would probably hear about everything later, but for now, there was no need to risk trouble by talking too loudly around her.

The two stood in silence for a short while, the hot sun starting to dry out the rough and rain soaked land Shampoo had grown up in. Behind her were the remains of everything she had ever really known, and the only place she had ever considered calling home. She had hoped, dreamed, to bring Ranma back to the Amazon village as her willing and eager bridegroom. That… that would never happen now.

Not ever.

Lin Ke started to turn to head back.

"I'm sorry."

The other girl nearly stumbled.

"What?" she asked, lowering her voice.

"I'm… sorry," Shampoo repeated.

For a few very long seconds, Lin Ke thought about how to respond to that. She opened her mouth as if to reply, but then closed it again. Nodding sadly but saying nothing, the herbalist headed back to her wounded twin sister leaving Shampoo alone. The Amazon, possibly the last of her kind, closed her eyes and let Lin Ke go. She hadn't really expected an 'I forgive you' or 'thank you,' not after all the brutalization the innocent girl had unfairly endured over the years.

Her vision blurred, and Shampoo suddenly realized she was crying again.


	61. The Twilight of the Amazons VII

Thanks again for all the reviews, everyone! If you can believe it, I've actually had to trim down this arc (the Winter Triangle -> Twilight of the Amazons arc) from what I originally intended. As I write, I'm constantly making small adjustments and adding or moving scenes, depending on the impressions and expectations of my readers. As you can imagine, it is quite a task juggling virtually the entire main cast, giving them all their due and development, and not having the story bog down and not progress in terms of the plot. I had to make more than a few of those compromises in this chapter, but I hope you all like it as much as the last few!

* * *

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. The UNETCO timetable moves ever forward, but a new complication has arisen as the alien forces in the Far East surge out in unexpected numbers and with surprising fury. India and Juliet Squads have taken the _Procyon_, a cargo ship operated by the alien enthralled Sirius Group, and uncovered the existence of a terrible chemical weapon based on Chryssalid Venom. But already the Amazon village has been made a martyr – the first field test of a weapon the Sirius Group hopes to use against the city of Singapore.

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia **

Chapter XXI

_Twilight of the Amazons (Part 3) _

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

1998 

They were making too much noise between themselves, and now a dog was barking; it was almost certain that someone would notice. Everything had been going so well, too. It was a chilly late autumn, the sun sinking fat and low into the craggy outline of the mountains and the clouds racing across the darkening sky. It was a fine time for a raid. Shampoo and her cohorts had, unfortunately, not been the only ones to come to that conclusion.

So they fought and cursed in silence, or at least they tried to. None dared to cry out in pain, even if they were soon likely to be found out. Shan Pu spit blood down into the face of the girl tearing viciously at her hair. She clearly didn't know when to give up. Another blow to the pinned girl's face snapped her head to the side and into the dirt. Her grip loosened, and Shampoo pulled herself free, rolled off the girl, and savagely kicked her in the ribs.

Wiping the blood from her lips and lower jaw, she looked around, saw Bra Shu, and smiled viciously, bearing partly blood smeared teeth. She had not let Shan Pu down. The two girls she'd had to account for were both on the ground, one cradling her arm, the other her face. Her strawberry hair disheveled, and exotic green eyes twinkling, Bra Shu had both of the defeated girls' knives in one hand, twirling them playfully between her fingers.

"Curse you… Shan…" One of the girls on the ground snarled, looking up at the other Amazon girl but making no overt moves.

"Heh!" Shan Pu snickered at her, but her actual voice low and quiet. "Maybe one day you'll learn and give up instead of fighting me, Mei Ru."

"Get out of here!" Bra Shu hissed, tossing the knives into the dirt. The four beaten girls quickly made a hasty retreat, Xai Vu and one of her less injured cronies helping the other two to run off. They soon disappeared into the grove of old olive trees, ancient descendants of transplants from a far away land. Ironically enough, Shampoo and her cohort had made their sneak attack from that very same copse of trees and thorny bushes.

With their apparent departure, Shan Pu motioned for Bra Shu to stay and guard the area while she went to check up on the other half of their little party. The old storehouse was stonework, and partly merged into a low dividing wall between fields. The wall was a good enough obstacle for curious animals, but not much else. Swinging open the wooden door, Shan Pu noted the heavy lock, as well as the fact that she had forgotten to tell Mei Ru to thank the lock picker for her.

They wouldn't have dared to actually try and break the door down. A little thievery was expected, encouraged even, to gain high standing in the _yǎng yù_… but property damage would not be tolerated by the adults of the tribe. Inside the storehouse, however, was a wealth of foodstuffs, not just in quantity but variety as well. It was too much of an opportunity not to take.

Shan Pu nearly salivated at the sight, she was so hungry. One could survive on a diet of rice-gruel and water, but after a week of just that anyone would hope for a little smoked fish or cooked meat. Even some different assorted vegetables sounded like a feast. She supposed that the depravation wouldn't have been as bad to people used to that sort of minimalist diet, but before the _yǎng yù_ she had enjoyed fine, generous foods and even sweets. Losing all that had driven some to great lengths to relive those meals over the last year.

Looking around with a strategic rather than hungry eye, however, Shan Pu saw a problem. There was a boy on the floor, unconscious, wearing servant's clothes. The problem was that his left leg lay splayed at an unnatural angle – it was broken. He had either fallen, or been pushed down, or… who knew?

"Lo Shin!" Shan Pu barked. "Are you done yet?"

"Just another minute!" A voice came from deeper in the storehouse, behind a heavy shelf of sealed urns and pots. A few were glass, too, with commercial labels, and a few were boxes. Shan Pu picked one up and read the label. It was some kind of strange pasta and cheese. It sounded gross, and there was no time to cook anything anyway.

"Stuff your face all you want, just finish quickly!" Shan Pu called, knowing that, for Lo Shin and her sister, 'just another minute' meant at least five.

She then quickly found a jar of olives, and ripped off the cover. Many Amazons enjoyed olives as a traditional dish, and while Shan Pu thought of them as un-Chinese and thus less than proper, she didn't mind the taste of them either. Plus, she knew Bra Shu loved them.

Pouring a dozen or more into one hand, she called out the door, "Hey!" and threw the jar.

Bra Shu caught the vessel, smiled brightly, and helped herself while she kept watch. Eating the olives as quickly as she could, Shan Pu quickly searched out the closest meat she could find, and found it in the form of cured pork sausages. She saw, however, that four had already been taken down, and assumed Lo or Po Shin had them already. Taking too much would be punished much more harshly than taking what was perceived as 'enough.'

She had been about to yell "Get back here!" to the twins when Po Shin, the dark blue haired one of the nearly-but-not-quite identical pair appeared (Lo had bluish hair as well, but it was curiously a much lighter shade). She had a small bag clutched tightly in her hands, and it was hopefully half of what would be seen by the elders as minor adolescent pilfering and not greedy outright thievery. Lo Shin was close behind, with the remains of a small cabbage still in her mouth.

A loud feline hiss came from near the door: Bra Shu's warning signal!

The three Amazon girls made a break for the door, jumping over the still prone and injured boy on the floor. Bra Shu, loyal in the face of anything and everything, still stood watch instead of running off and saving herself. She pointed over down across the length of the wall, where they could see someone approaching, walking slowly in their direction. As a unit, the girls turned to try and run, back into the cover of the trees and bushes.

They took a step, and so did the stranger…

Except her stride was a little longer.

Before she knew what was even happening, Shan Pu flowed face first into a solid body. Stumbling back, but not falling, she looked up with wide eyes. The woman blocking their path to escape did not look dangerous. She had no weapons, she was old by children's standards, and she didn't look very athletic or well built. She had a weave of braided hair done up in a bun. Wearing work clothes, in another country on the other side of the world, one could have almost mistaken her for a middle aged homeowner in the middle of tending her garden.

"E… Elder!" Lo Shin gasped.

It was Sin Ku, Sin Ku Long, Sin Ku the Dragon.

The older woman smiled.

Shan Pu gulped, hard. If Sin Ku hadn't, unfortunately, owned so damn much of the arable land north of the village, this wouldn't have happened. It was either risk raiding one of her storehouses or make due stealing tidbits from male servants or indentured outsider villagers. But what was the Elder doing here? She should still have been at the village with the girl she was 'mentoring.' It had been the talk of the mess hall just yesterday! Elder Sin Ku's deep black eyes trailed up and down Shan Pu's body.

She didn't even have to make a demand or give an order. Lo Shin and Po Shin stepped forward, holding out their only recently ill-gotten gains. Sin Ku took them without a word. Next to Shan Pu, Bra Shu tensed, her fingers coiling up into a fist. Shan Pu knew better. In this sort of situation, the best one could hope for was to amuse the enemy and try and convince them to not do everything they were in their power to do.

Her eyes scanned past Sin Ku, to the olive trees and the bushes near them. She could see movement, and she could guess who it was, too. Mir Ru and her coterie were still nearby, and probably waiting to pounce. Sin Ku collected everything they had stolen and not yet swallowed, and walked without saying a word into the storehouse. They could have probably taken that opportunity to try and escape, but it would have been a short and futile exercise. Even scattering in every direction and running at top speed, the Elder would have caught them in mere moments.

Shan Pu looked to Lo and Po Shin, and she could see they were getting scared of what was to come. The two girls weren't terrible fighters, especially if they could work together as a pair, but when out of their league they tended to get jittery and visibly nervous. It was a weakness Bra Shu didn't have. The brown haired girl stood proud and defiant, the very picture of an Amazon, ready, willing and even eager to get her deserved punishment. Shan Pu sighed and straightened her own posture, sparing one last quick look at where Mir Ru and her cronies were lying in wait.

Sin Ku emerged, holding a thick bamboo rod. When she spoke her voice was harsh and wheezing, the result of her training made speaking either difficult or painful or both. It made her strong, though, strong enough to take a place on the Council of Elders. She was young, too, by their standards, and had personalized a means of looking younger than she actually was, as well as prolonging her life. Sin Ku may have looked middle aged, but she was over eighty.

"The cabbages," she said, slowly, struggling with the words.

Before Lo Shin could say anything, Shampoo strode forward.

"I ate them!" she declared, raising her voice enough to hopefully hide her own growing anxiety and fear.

Sin Ku's onyx eyes narrowed, and she struck with lightning speed. The bamboo rod hit too fast to see, and Shan Pu's left arm went completely limp. Pain fueled tears threatened to well up in her eyes, but she forced them back down. The Elder had struck a painful and disabling nerve cluster near her shoulder, and it was already starting to swell painfully.

Sin Ku looked from Shan Pu to the other girls present, each in turn.

"The olives," she said.

"I ate those, too," Shan Pu quickly answered, just as Bra Shu started to open her mouth to speak. "It was me!"

A stinging blow to somewhere in her middle sent Shan Pu to the ground. This time she had no notion of exactly where and how she had been struck, only that it hurt. Her body cramped up, and a wave of pain shot along her body. She gritted her teeth to keep from crying out like a child. She was ten now, she had to act like it!

"The sausages," she heard, and grimaced. They hadn't even gotten the chance to eat those yet!

"I took them!" It was a blatant lie, obvious to anyone. Hell, the sausages had been in the bags carried by Lo Shin and Po Shin. Still, Sin Ku accepted the admission of guilt, and waited for Shan Pu to push herself back up and onto her feet. A second later, and another hard blow went her flying onto her back and filling her mind with white hot pain.

"Shan Pu!" "Shan Pu!"

She heard her name; recognized the voices, and slowly got back up.

"The tubers."

"I ate them." Another blow to the neck, hard and sharp.

"The rice."

"I ate that… too…" The bamboo rod came down, this time on her thigh. She stumbled, but managed to keep from falling. It continued for some time as Sin Ku was naturally thorough. To every statement, Shan Pu admitted that she had stolen or eaten it. The blows came down, sometimes they were painful, other times, terribly so. Whenever she fell, Sin Ku would wait for her to get back up.

It was by far the worst beating she had ever endured up to that point in her life.

Finally, they came to the end, and the last order of business: "The boy."

Shan Pu thought of the young servant and his broken leg. It would heal, and since he was one of Sin Ku's, he would probably get pretty good medical treatment. Yes, he would heal and be able to get back to his duties. For a moment, Shan Pu wondered how old he was and where he was from, even what his name was, and then all her thoughts turned to another question: 'Will the Elder break my leg, too?'

She hesitated.

Shan Pu turned her head, saw Bra Shu, and Lo Shin and Po Shin. She hadn't forgotten Mir Ru and her little gang, either, hiding nearby. She steeled herself, stood back up, and took a deep breath. Sin Ku waited, and Shan Pu raised her head proudly.

"I am responsible," she said, and behind her she could hear Po Shin cry out in helpless anguish. 'So,' Shan Pu thought, 'that was who did it.'

Sin Ku nodded once, and leaned in, her neutral features growing closer until she could whisper in Shan Pu's ear, "Your mother and I… are on good terms. You have a pretty face, and I won't mark it." She paused and licked her dry lips. "But…"

Shan Pu closed her eyes. She hadn't cried yet, and had no intention of doing so now. The rumors about Sin Ku being in the south with her present charge had been false, maybe even started to lure some poor unprepared group into this trap and test them, but by the inflection in the Elder Amazon's voice, Shan Pu didn't doubt that she took the tradition of pederasty quite seriously. Many Elders did, but there was nothing Shan Pu found appealing or admirable in this woman that would have her consent to such a thing, no matter the station or tradition.

Behind her, Shan Pu could hear Po Shin crying, and she turned slightly, looking at the slightly younger girl with an angry glare.

"Don't you dare cry," Shan Pu barked. "Compose yourself!"

Po Shin hid her eyes and face behind one of her hands, but she nodded, and dutifully reigned in her disgraceful behavior. Shan Pu faced forward, and stood still.

Sin Ku grinned in approval and amusement.

"What a beautiful Amazon you'll become," she wheezed, and an instant later, Shan Pu howled in pain.

* * *

"Something wrong? … Shampoo?"

Shampoo blinked, tearing her eyes away from the old storehouse and the memories it conjured. It was virtually untouched by either time or tragedy, and the olive trees and bushes were exactly like they had been, back then. Adjusting her grip on her heavy laser, she faced forward and continued the march towards the alien occupied Amazon village.

"Nothing wrong," she said, assuring her would-be-should-be-intendedand squad leader. "I was just looking for something."

Standing ahead of her, and behind Konatsu, Ranma seemed to accept the excuse. Something he had heard over the officer-level comms had made him anxious to get to the village.

"We're almost there," he said, encouragingly, and the squad continued on their way. India and Juliet Squads had been ordered to clear the outlying farmlands and the like, supporting the northern push towards the village and the alien Battleship. They wouldn't be participating in the actual seizure of the ship itself, though they would assist in encircling and taking the village… and points south. This meant they would be storming Jyusenkyou and Phoenix Mountain, where they had prior combat experience.

Shampoo kept an eye out, not just for ambushes, but for any sign of other Amazons. She thought instantly and fondly about her old cohort. After that night, the three girls had helped her back to the communal barracks, and chased off Mir Ru's little gang. Four badly hurt girls would have been worth pouncing on for revenge, but three healthy ones and one badly hurt companion? They hadn't risked it, and all the time she took to heal, Shampoo's cohorts had brought her food and water and taken care of her.

Her _yǎng yù_ education had been difficult, but in the end, she had been recognized for her efforts and achievements. She had endured the rites of initiation, the rites of humbling, the rites of womanhood, and the rites of strength. She was high born, with a strong outsider father and a respected mother, and she had emerged as a full member of Amazon society with all the rights and responsibilities therein. She had dedicated herself to getting stronger, and she had even apprenticed under Sin Ku for a time (an unhappy time) as well as continuing her education and training under her great grandmother.

She was no 'genius' like her great grandmother had been called in her youth, but she was strong! She had been respected, too, and even feared, for the two were basically shades of fruit picked from the same tree. She had been _happy_, too. Then… then everything had turned upside down! So much had changed on that horrible day two years ago, when an outsider girl with a red pigtail effortlessly beat her in combat.

She stopped by a charred body, burned beyond recognition.

"Hold up a second," Ranma held up his hand, and Juliet Squad did just as ordered. "Alright. There's something unusual to the west of here, and Command wants a pair of Mark One eyeballs to check it out."

"Something unusual?" Konatsu asked, and Shan Pu could guess that he was curious about whether Ranma had volunteered Juliet Squad or if he had been picked by the Colonel. She was.

Ranma replied with one word: "Fire."

* * *

Mousse and Kuno stood over the dead Snakeman, its lower torso disintegrated and blown apart. The alien had been patrolling with two Chryssalids, and neither of the terror units had survived the quick firefight, either. As soon as the two India Squad members opened fire, picking off the Snakeman, they had backed up as they fired, full auto, at the charging 'lids. Their fire wasn't too accurate, since the Chryssalids zigged and zagged at speeds even a martial artist could respect, but by sheer volume it got the job done.

Kuno cocked his head to the side as Mousse kneeled down, retrieving the Snakeman's weapon: an alien-make plasma rifle like their own. The weapon itself felt clumsy in human hands, with a noticeable lack of a stock, bizarre looking sights for aiming, and an uncomfortable grip. XCOM issued medium plasmas were all refitted for human senses and sensibilities. There was one thing, though, that interested the Master of Hidden Weapons.

He unlocked the rifle clip, and held it up. Putting the rifle down, he then fished around near the body, and found another totally unused clip. Kuno, meanwhile, checked his weapon for some outward sign or display indicating how many shots were left. Unlike Mousse, he had obviously forgotten that, unlike laser weapons, plasmas had finite ammunition and the clips needed changing.

"I think you've expended a little more than twenty shots since you got that weapon," Mousse said, standing back up and holding out the unused plasma rifle clip. "A medium plasma has 28 shots per clip."

Kuno gave up looking for a numerical display or 'charge meter' and accepted Mousse's judgment. "That… does seem accurate, yes." He took the clip. "My thanks."

"No problem," Mousse ejected the cartridge on his plasma rifle, and did it obviously enough that Kuno could mimic his action without actually asking for assistance. He neatly tucked the nearly depleted clip into the folds of his combat vest/robe, and waited for Kuno to finish.

"You know," the male Amazon commented, watching Kuno fit the clip into place. "It occurs to me we've used up about… seven or eight thousand dollars between the two of us."

"The ammunition?" Kuno asked, and locked the clip firmly into place. "How much is that in Yen?"

Mousse 'hmm'ed as they resumed their patrol.

"What is it again?" he asked, rhetorically, and took a guess. "A hundred something yen to the dollar? You're rich; you should know."

"We of the noble and distinguished Kuno family are not to be mistaken for sundry money lenders nor do we lower themselves with the exchange of baubles and trinkets," Kuno haughtily declared. "Such paltry sums…! We leave such concerns to our accountants, and other avaricious types."

Mousse snickered at that.

"What provokes such derisive laughter?" Kuno asked, more curious than truly insulted. Mousse figured he probably would have taken more umbrage if they had had this talk just a few months ago, before India Squad.

"Just… Nabiki sort of takes advantage of you, doesn't she?" Mousse answered the question with one of his own, along with another for added measure. "How much do you suppose she's cheated you out of over the years?"

"I would not care," the swordsman replied. "Such a question is meaningless to myself, a scion of the House of Kuno."

"A fool and his money are soon parting," Mousse quoted. "Or so the saying goes."

This time, Kuno snickered in amusement and amiable condescension. "You fail to see there is a noble and proper _samurai_ pride in disregarding such trivial financial matters. If I deign to bicker over a sum, it is purely in humor and jest, for the woman you speak of enjoys such inanity."

"Well…" Mousse shrugged as he scanned the area for any additional threats. It was pretty quiet. Dead quiet, actually. "I never had the luxury of thinking like that, Kuno. Not everyone is born rich enough to waste money… I wanted to ask this before, but where _does_ your family get their money?"

"A tawdry question like that is fitting for one of such bucolic breeding," Kuno said with an arrogant snort. "If you must know, we own land."

"How much?"

A casual shrug. "Enough."

"Lucky stiff."

Drawing closer to the object of their patrol, Mousse pointed with his rifle to the building up ahead. It was partly collapsed, but a single large chimney rose up into the sky, untouched. There was a simple thatched roof, but as rural at it appeared, it was shaped all wrong for a normal house. It was too squat, and while there were tools and a well nearby, among other things, there were no fields. This was no farmhouse. A large stone furnace betrayed its purpose.

"A blacksmith of some kind?" Kuno guessed, and accurately, too.

"Smaller than the one in the village, but you are essentially correct…" Mousse slowed his step, approaching more cautiously. "This is… was… Fa Nu's Forge."

"Fan?"

"Fa Nu was one of the village Elders," Mousse explained, as they passed by a low stone wall barely as high as a man's thigh. He looked around for any familiar faces, living or dead. Kuno briefly turned around, checking behind them. Everything sounded quiet enough, and if Command wanted them to head somewhere, it was as easy as giving the order. But none came.

"You mentioned these Elders before," Kuno said, facing forward again, but watchful of their right flank. "During the briefing."

"Oh, you were listening, then!" Mousse laughed. "Between inhaling those Calorie Mates, anyway. All I heard from you that entire briefing was 'crunch crunch crunch.'"

"Twas not that bad! Surely you exaggerate…" Kuno paused. "You do exaggerate, do you not?"

"You were a little loud."

"…"

"But, yes, Fa Nu…" Mousse sighed, the building getting closer and closer. There was no movement on the hand-portable motion sensors they'd been generously given, and it was as still and quiet as the grave.

"In the village, there were always five Elders," he began, and clarified a bit before getting onto the rest. "One for each element in the _Wu Xing_. The Elders were the strongest and most experienced in a particular area, and represented it on the Council that governed the village. Any one of them had, well, the English word would probably be 'veto.' So to do anything, all five had to agree to it."

Kuno nodded. "That woman from before…"

"Pi Lu, yes. It isn't a big surprise, but she represented the Earth element," Mousse replied, and shrugged. "She wasn't very popular, either. She was from a low family, with a male Amazon for a father instead of a strong outsider. I guess if you were an Amazon, you'd call her a… country bumpkin, or something like that."

The other man smirked. "I like to think I'd phrase it more creatively."

"You would," Mousse agreed, and continued, "The others on the Council were of higher standing, though not really stronger than Pi Lu. They just had a better nose for politics and schemes. There was Pi Lo, 'Pillow' would be the Anglicization, who was a supporter of Khu Lon and enemy of Pi Lu… 'Pill.' Pi Lo represented the wood element, and Khu Lon represented water. Then there was Sin Ke, 'Sink,' representing fire, and Fa Nu, 'Fan,' representing metal."

"Khu Lon always had Pi Lo and Sin Ke in her pocket, giving her a lot of say on the Council. Either Fa Nu or Pi Lo were the weakest of the Elders, in terms of fighting ability. Pi Lo was a healer for the most part, though I know she and Khu Lon also made poisons. Pi Lo was the one who tried to heal my eyes instead of taking me to a doctor…"

Mousse shrugged again at that old memory. "But I couldn't have paid for an operation anyway, so what does it matter?"

"Would that you had been born in Japan…" Kuno began, but Mousse cut him off.

"Don't get me wrong, Kuno," he said, looking over his shoulder at the so called Blue Thunder of Kendo. "I'd proud of what I am: because I am an Amazon, in spite of being an Amazon. Even if I could change my fate… I wouldn't. If I dwelled on 'what if,' then I'd have died a long time ago, and I wouldn't be me."

His comrade nodded once – it wouldn't be brought up like that again.

"Anyway," Mousse spoke as they entered the dusty open area close to where part of the building had collapsed. "Fa Nu was from a good family line, like Khu Lon's, and she was one of the very few who tolerated me. The Amazon tribe has a long history of magical artifacts, and every Elder representing 'metal' on the council had to contribute at least one of her own design. She let me work for her; let me earn the money I needed to leave the village and eventually find a Master I could learn from…"

His voice trailed off as they looked inside the building. Kuno had lowered his rifle slightly, favoring his sword with his free hand in what would likely be a melee confrontation, but both soldiers quickly saw there was no need. There simply wasn't anything alive inside.

It was a terrible sight: there were a half dozen bodies scattered about. Four were male, one was a young woman, and the other was a much older woman wearing plain clothes. Unlike all the others, she had hair cut short. Many of the younger victims had suffered from wounds brought on by blades of one sort or another. The old woman, however, had been impaled by several stone lances that rose up out of the ground. The ground was slick with blood, worse than even the butchery they themselves had indulged in on the Procyon, just a couple hours ago.

"Fa Nu," Mousse said, and then he looked down at one of the male corpses. "And Rho Bu… you didn't leave. You never could, could you?"

Kuno took in the grim scene with audible dejection. "A friend of yours?"

"Yeah," Mousse said, and left it at that. He turned to where Fa Nu was all but crucified in stone, and started taking her down. Kuno moved to help, but instead watched his back and kept an eye out for trouble. Carefully laying the Elder on the ground next to Rho Bu, Mousse gently crossed her arms over her chest and closed her eyes.

"At least they were given the mercy of dying as human beings, and not creatures of madness," Kuno said, and quickly clapped his hands together and bowed his head respectfully. Mousse had no such superstitions; he just stood by in silence.

Then it was back to work, to duty, to what had to be done.

"You're right," he agreed, and briefly looked towards the village. "Whatever was used to hit the village seemed to have a limited dispersal. Even this close, people were unaffected."

"You believe the next attack will be much larger?" Kuno had to ask; Mousse only nodded. "Villains! Justice may be slow, but it is as sure as the dawn. They shall pay for this a hundredfold!"

"I don't know about a hundredfold…" Mousse spoke evenly, coolly. "But I like to think that karma catches up with us all, especially when it comes to crimes of this magnitude."

Kuno watched as his team mate headed towards the back of the room, near the massive forge. There was an assortment of tools and rather mundane looking items there, including some gaudy and cheap looking jewelry. None of it looked particularly noteworthy, though there was a quality sword in the back – it was just that his tastes were more along the lines of traditional katanas and the like. Other than that, though, there seemed to be hardly anything that one couldn't find at any garden variety trinket and pawn shop.

"Where are you going?" he asked, adjusting his grip on his plasma rifle. "What is it?"

Mousse didn't turn around, but he did answer.

"Something… interesting…"

* * *

It awoke, eyes struggling to adjust to the light. The world seemed cloudy, and parts of its body were experiencing discomfort. The sensation was strange and unwelcome. It had the mind of a Sectoid, but the flesh and blood of a human. Alien hormones and organs tried to distract its linear, perfect thinking.

Rolling onto its side, the former alien heaved, coughing up some bizarre concoction from within the bowels of its new body. It knew the sensation: misery, and came to the conclusion that its mission would only lead to more of the stuff. It was an engineer, not a medic, and from the moment it had emerged from the pool it had been uncomfortable with its new human body. It was too… gaudy was perhaps the best word. It had unnecessary features, strange orifices, unexpected feelings, and… hair.

Trying to will its body into submission, the freshly conscious Sectoid quickly analyzed its surroundings. It was disorienting, but then it felt the growing presence of the Mind, and it knew that the Gestalt had awoken it. Nearby, the medic who had been turned into a human lay on a cot of some sort, unconscious. It would be alone, then, but that was fine; one was all it would take.

The touch of the Mind helped it orient itself, and identify where it was. It lay back down, feigning unconsciousness, and identified nearby targets: there were some crates, both opened and closed, and a pile of equipment. There was a stack of rifles, a stack of clips, but no grenades. Not that it would have made a grab for one. There were a few humans around as well, but they all looked alike at the best of times, even when not wearing identical suits of armor. More important than them, it saw the human's ship, parked under a protective overhang near the entrance of the mine they had taken refuge in.

It was… or had been… well hidden.

* * *


	62. The Twilight of the Amazons VIII

"I see…" Zraz loaded his Blaster Bomb Launcher, and stared out to the east. Sneer had taken refuge in the Battleship and left the final order of business to the Snakeman Commander. He was to stay behind and ensure that the Battleship could safely escape, and then he was free to 'do as he would.' Of course, his options were limited to basically one: fight to the death. He hissed out a throaty Snakeman sigh.

It was a good battle to go out on, though he couldn't say he was eager to die.

Just to the north, he could see explosions, and through his men in that location, he could hear the cries of plasma weapons, and feel the deaths of his soldiers and terror units. The humans were methodical and efficient, advancing, sweeping, pinning down groups of aliens and either cutting them down, using mind control to cause confusion, or blowing them to bits. Zraz's forces were outnumbered now, and while he had caused more damage to the humans than any other Commander in quite some time, the outcome of the battle was no longer really in doubt.

He took solace in the Mind, and more to the point, he took his time plotting out a careful trajectory. The absolute limit of a Blaster Bomb was nine waypoints, though eight was the typical maximum one could expect without a possible malfunction along the way. He had to specify and program the bomb just right – the right distances, orientations, and count on the internal guidance/avoidance programming to handle the rest of the minutiae. After this last bomb, he would be done, and the Mind would smile in memory of him.

It was a… nice thought.

With a dull thump, the launcher activated, and a fat silver disk erupted from inside the weapon, speeding ahead before sharply turning up into the sky and disappearing. Throwing the now empty weapon to the ground, Zraz regarded the rifle slung over his shoulder and the emergency plasma pistol that hung by his waist. That, and four grenades; it was more than enough to go out with.

But then, abruptly, he looked behind him and saw a possible… _alternative_.

* * *

The blaster bomb accelerated from zero kilometers per hour, right before firing, to four hundred by the time it hit the first waypoint. By the time it met the second waypoint, this one about a hundred meters in the air, it was a mach two football, looking for a receiver. By the third waypoint, it had reached an uninterceptable cruising speed of mach six. At that speed, its mass alone would have given it a kinetic hitting power of two megajoules, the rough equivalent of a large car hitting an object at over two hundred and sixty miles per hour.

But it was not a purely solid object. Much of its insides were a weave of alien electronics and propulsion, and a small but potent Elerium-based gravitation engine. The bombardment of the Elerium within the reactor not only produced the gravity waves that allowed it to move, but also waste anti-matter. Unlike with a plasma weapon, where the stream produced almost entirely anti-matter, the Blaster bomb was more like a tiny UFO reactor, where it produced mostly gravity waves. The relatively small amount of anti matter was collected within cyclotron oriented pockets inside the reactor housing, stored there in tiny magnetic bottles.

Blaster Bombs had a limited operational reactor time which determined speed and range. The shorter the flight, the faster it went, using up all its fuel. The longer the flight, the slower it had to go. Zraz's bomb crossed several miles in as many heartbeats, made two sudden right turns, entered the mouth of the mine, made two more right turns, and then headed towards its eighth and final waypoint – directly in the cargo hold of the landed Avenger fighter-transport.

Had it hit the craft's armored exterior, the damage caused would have been negligible. Even the gravitation engines were armored and equipped with safeguards. The whole ship was designed from the start to withstand far more powerful alien weapons, up to even a direct hit by a Battleship-class Plasma Cannon. The inside… wasn't.

The warship flared up like the sun as the blaster bomb impacted just behind the armored cockpit and detonated; stored antimatter encountering its normal counterparts and annihilating in a great wave of plasma and overpressure. A tidal wave of fire poured out from within the hold of the ship, as tiny secondary explosions followed in its wake, but were ultimately lost and drowned out amid the echoing roar that filled the cave. As the smoke cleared, the armored outer skeleton of the Avenger remained amazingly intact, but it was just a shell with no guts inside.

Miles away, the massive bulk of the alien Battleship started to rise.

* * *

Zraz watched as Sneer and the ship, his ship, started to take off. With the human fighter craft downed, there was no threat keeping it from making its escape. Of course, the humans no doubt already had more ships in the vicinity, and even more on the way. But the Battleship would almost certainly get back to base.

The Mind was pleased with him.

While he pondered what to do with his last few minutes of life, an earth bug landed on his forearm and Zraz saw it try and poke its proboscis through his scales. It seemed to be having a hard time finding a good spot, and Zraz squashed it. A dead body wouldn't have cared, but he did – he wasn't dead just yet!

"Fall back!" he ordered, and the Mind relayed it to all his subordinates. "Escape if you can. Fight to the death if you can not."

Zraz turned around and slithered towards the cursed springs of Jyusenkyou.

* * *

The first thing Ranma and Shampoo had noticed was that the fire wasn't spreading. It existed in a series of perfect circles, one within the other: an outer ring drawn in fire, with four smaller rings aligned towards the cardinal points of a compass, and a sixth inner circle overlapping parts of the smaller four. The flames may as well have been artificial. Grass nearby didn't catch it, and there was barely any smoke rising into the air.

"Great Dragon Lotus Seal," Shampoo said, using English instead of Chinese, since Ranma understood the former and not the latter.

"It ain't much of a barrier," Ranma observed, as they approached a two story cottage. Unlike virtually everything else in the area, it was intact and untouched by war. It had a certain rustic charm, situated among hills and rich farmland. Two silos sat against the horizon like married pillars of stone. As they drew closer, a sudden sheet of flame rose up from the inner circle, rising a dozen feet into the sky.

Ranma drew back his hand. "Ah. There it is!"

"Careful…" Shampoo warned, as the leader of Juliet Squad tested the flame with his gloved hand. Their stealth suits were not as well insulated as personal armor, and while the latter was rated as resistant to anything less than a thousand degrees Celsius, the former only provided a fraction of the protection. Ranma's fingers disappeared into the fire, but he quickly drew back again.

"Woah! That's pretty hot, actually!" he sounded more amused and excited than anything else. "It tries to stick to you, too. We could probably just jump right through, though."

He held out his hand, and she took it. Together, they jumped through the fire even as it sprung up and roared all around them. Any normal human or group of normal humans not possessed of firefighter level gear would have instantly lit up like candles. The speed of the two martial artists combined with the insulated fireproof protection of their stealth suits allowed them a far easier passage.

Inside the inner circle, the two parted and looked themselves over. The suits were intact, with no obvious melting, deforming, peeling or burning. The little trip had made the inside of the suit more than a little hot, however.

"I'm gonna need one long shower after this," Ranma said and faced the house. He only managed to take one more step before the main door to the building slid open. The two soldiers paused as a woman exited, closed the screen behind her, and then headed towards them.

She appeared to be a woman in her forties or fifties, dark hair braided and tied together behind her head, wearing a plain white cloak. She didn't wield weapons of any visible sort, and by her demeanor she seemed calm and collected. Anything but the savage half-animal so many other Amazons had become after exposure to the Venom weapon.

"Shan Pu…" the woman said, speaking in raspy Chinese. "I do not recognize the other one."

"She looks well," Ranma commented with a hint of disappointment; he'd been looking forward to a good fight. Neither questioned just how this woman had determined Shampoo's identity even though both she and Ranma wore unisex outfits that made them almost impossible to tell apart, much less ID.

"Elder…!" Shampoo started to say, ready to implore her to follow them and head to one of the pick up and identification points for survivors.

"There are… no more Elders, Shan Pu," Sink corrected the younger girl, her voice wheezing. She tilted her head back slightly, eyes drifting off to stare up at the sky.

"There is you, Elder!" Shampoo implored, and took a few steps towards the woman. "You lead the Amazons now, you…"

"No…" Sink lowered her eyes to look down at her. "This was… my doing. I destroyed us."

"W-what?" Shampoo shook her head – what was this woman talking about.

"Those clothes… that armor…" Sink replied, disdainfully. "You work for those foreigners who told us to take shelter with them… to accept their charity. We read that letter you wrote us, Shan Pu…"

Shampoo could feel something ominous behind Sink's words. A chill ran down her spine as she remembered her letter, her desperate letter, advising the Council to consider the village as in danger. The letter had told them to accept the help of the foreigners who delivered it; that they had experience and knowledge of an enemy unknown to the Amazons themselves. She had even hinted at there being strong and unmarried males in the organization, which was a clever little incentive she had thought would be appreciated.

Sink reached into a concealed pocket in her cloak, and took out something small and electronic. It was a cell phone. That surprised Shampoo, since Sink was old fashioned, and had never shown much interest in technology or the outside world. Really, only Cologne and Fan had ever…

"Khu Lon gave me this," Sink said, and she dropped it to the ground. "She told us… told me… that the Amazons must stand alone. I… agreed…"

"no…" Shampoo's voice was small, shocked, and weak. "that can't be…"

"What's going on?" Ranma asked, not following the back and forth Chinese at all. "Shampoo! What did she say?"

Shampoo just shook her head, stunned.

Sink continued, her wheeze taking on a maddened tinge, "The Amazons are gone. We're all… gone… I killed Pi Lo… and so many others. I came here... to die." Her eyes grew wide and frightened. "I can see… when I close my eyes, I see a skull, a face, Sneering and mocking me…" She gasped, a ragged breath tearing free from her throat. "Pi Lo...! What have I done?"

"I heard her say Cologne – what is she saying, Shampoo?" Ranma was more insistent now, and Shampoo glanced at him.

"She claims…"

And then Sink started to scream.

* * *

Sitting at the edge of her bed, eyes closed, Cologne smirked.

"That's a fine idea," she murmured, smirk growing. "Use us."

By the window, the good Doctor Tofu expressed no outward emotion. But behind his glasses, dead eyes narrowed.

"Let's see how you do, Ranma."

* * *

Sink staggered and stared at Ranma and Shampoo with glassy eyes. Covering the side of her face with her right hand, she started to wheeze painfully between breaths, the tempo of them growing with each passing second. Then, she blinked, and her face contorted with rage.

"So: it was all a trick…" She took a deep breath. "Khu Lon!!"

Shampoo instantly recognized what was to come, and with a hurtful cry, raised her rifle to fire. But before she could get a shot off, Ranma's hand seized the weapon and threw off her aim. A lance of laser light shot harmlessly into the sky.

"What are you doing?" Ranma barked. "She isn't infected!"

"You don't…" Shampoo started to object, and get her weapon free to fire again, but it was too late. Sink let out the breath she had just sucked in, except that instead of air, a column of fire billowed out of her mouth. Like a stream of fire, it twisted through the air, curving and curling around the maddened Amazon Elder.

"Ranma…!" Shampoo cried. "We have to…"

"She ain't infected. We can save her!" He forced Shampoo's heavy laser down so that it pointed at the ground. "Besides…." He faced Sink, and locked his plasma rifle into place behind his back. "I wanna know what she knows, and ya don't get much talk out of a corpse!"

His battle aura snapped around him like a sheath of blue flame. Shampoo felt it as much as saw it and she could tell just by proximity that he was mentally preparing himself; steeling his aura in confidence. Like Ryouga ran on depression, anger, fear and resentment, Ranma rooted his mental power in confidence, focus and a passionate desire to be the best. Shampoo sighed, and hopped back and away, landing several meters behind Ranma.

Sink was, by this point, surrounded by fire.

It was a twisting helix that crisscrossed all around her, forming an impenetrable shield. Shampoo had heard of that technique: The Great Dragon Spiral Flower. It was impossible to get close and hit Sink now, though it was possible that the stealth suit provided enough of a defense against fire to make a melee strike practical. From what Shampoo had learned, it was not the sort of technique one could just keep using – it was meant to form a last ditch defense. Only Sink had such a volume of _ki_ that she could just stand behind the flames during an entire fight.

"If you stand between myself and Khu Lon…" Sink rasped between breaths of flame. "I'll turn you into ashes… boy!"

Ranma just chuckled. "Bring it on, old woman!"

Then, realizing something, he amended that in a deadpan voice, "Oh wait. She doesn't speak Japanese, does she?" He snapped his fingers, and pointed at his team mate. "Shampoo! I'll need you to translate my taunts into Chinese!"

Shampoo's jaw dropped; was he serious?!

They didn't get the chance to discuss it further, as a snake like whip of flame descended. Ranma blurred, and Shampoo nearly missed the motion. It was so easy to forget just how fast he was, and compared to his full body speed, his striking speed was an order faster still. The whip missed, burning a long trench in the earth, but instantly re-emerged and shattered into six others just like it.

They shot off in every direction, stretching and growing longer, pursuing Ranma as he ran and dodged. Flipping through the air over Sink's head, he pointed both hands down, aiming for every martial artist's weakest area: the blind spot behind the head. Dual _moko takabishas_ burst from his hands, but instead of passing right through Sink's Great Dragon Spiral Flower defense, they interacted with the _ki_-fueled flames, fizzling and scattering as they lost cohesion.

As Ranma drifted, surprised, back to the ground, and two giant whips of flame closed in on him from both sides. Shampoo gripped the handle of her rifle tightly, fighting the impulse to end the fight herself. She could do it, but all she had that was of any use here was her firearm. She remembered Ukyou, with her new _ki_ attack, and seeing Ranma like this only worried her more. It wasn't even just jealousy, and it wasn't just concern for Ranma's well being, but also the terrible suspicion that she was missing out on something very important to her… peers, if not friends.

Ranma's didn't panic at the approach of the fire whips, instead blocking them both with his hands. Amazingly, the ends of the whips seemed to disintegrate on contact with his palms, fizzling and crackling as burning embers filled the air. Ranma turned in midair, landed on his feet, and backed up a few feet, his hands still blocking and nullifying the flames. Finally they gave up, broke off, and twisted back into the air.

Amazingly, Ranma began to chuckle.

"That wasn't hard to counter. Didn't even need to see it twice!" He explained for Shampoo's benefit, and more of the whips gathered and snapped around him. "Her fire relies on ki to keep burning. If I can use my own ki to disrupt hers…!"

'Which is all well and good,' Shampoo thought, as Ranma began to dodge again. 'If you're at that level of the Art.'

It wasn't like _she_ could do it.

"Curse you!" Sink snarled, and she widened her stance slightly. Her right hand shot out to the side, fingers splayed, and then she thrust the arm in a diagonal motion. A jet like inferno swept along in the same motion, catching half of her own house and tearing it apart. Wood turned to ash and fell apart, leaving only smoking stone behind. Shampoo recognized it as the technique that must have destroyed that building Juliet Squad had passed by before: the Great Dragon Diving Claw.

A second later, the infuriated Amazon unleashed the perfect version of the technique, sweeping both her arms up, and shattering her own home into a million burning fragments. Shampoo lost sight of Ranma in the conflagration, and a moment later, Sink opened her mouth and released another torrent of flames, engulfing everything ahead of her in a wide cone.

"Ranma…?" Shampoo asked, and even a moment delay in his response seemed like minutes.

"Still here," he assured her, and Shampoo watched the burning rubble. Sure enough, Ranma was standing amid the debris, arms crossed in front of him in a stance she didn't recognize.

"Man!" he added, relaxing his stance somewhat. "This is like fighting Saffron, but with no Gekkaja … But with all this fire, I'd expect her techniques to be Phoenix this, Phoenix that, instead of this Dragon theme."

That, at least, Shampoo could answer.

"Among the women of the Amazon tribe, Dragon techniques use wind," Shampoo replied, "Like your Rising Dragon Ascension Blast. Wind creates and controls fire."

"Is that so?" Ranma slipped between a tangle of flaming tendrils, used his hands to flip into the air, and landed lightly just fifty meters from where Shampoo stood. He charged Sink again, and this time, Shampoo thought she could see what he was trying to do. It was impossible to lead Sink into a spiral, since she just stood in one place behind her fire shield, so Ranma was trying to lead her attacks into a spiral instead. But, just like before, he ended up narrowly escaping being engulfed by the flames, and jumping away.

Sink started to laugh.

"She's disrupting the spiral!" Ranma concluded. "First time since Herb that anyone's done that. She's _good_."

"You shame us both, hiding behind this outsider male!" Sink roared in Shampoo's direction. "Fight me and DIE, Khu Lon!"

Sink hopped up and landed, hard, on the ground, sending a circular spray of fire out in every direction. Both Ranma and Shampoo jumped as it rolled over the ground, burning everything in its path. Shampoo hadn't seen anything like it since Saffron. It was simply amazing that any normal human, even an Elder, had so much _ki_ literally to burn.

"How's a guy supposed to banter without a common language?! Maybe you'll understand this!" Ranma roared, and pumped his hands as he fired a rapid stream of ki blasts. "Moko Takabisha! Beam Style!"

Instead of overlapping or hitting the target at the same time, the _ki_ attacks formed into a stream or beam of mental energy. Individually, they weren't terribly strong, but each pulse hit in the same spot as the one before it. Shampoo watched, amazed, as Sink's flame shield blazed hot to compensate. But it was omnidirectional, and most of its energy was wasted. Ranma's attacks hit the same part of it over and over, and eventually, punched through.

For the first time Shampoo knew of, Sink had not only been hit, but knocked back. Her Great Dragon Spiral Flower technique faded away, leaving Sink standing unprotected, with her arms crossed over her face. Her face was contorted by rage and frustration, and the flaming whips in the air snapped and coiled all around her. Sink had always been notorious as the Elder with the worst and more unpredictable temper, and Shampoo was seeing why just now. Maybe it was a good thing Ranma hadn't been able to use his _hiryu shotenha_ on her – the resulting tornado would have been massive.

Sink roared, and began to spew flame straight up into the air.

This had to be one of the Elder's true secret techniques; Shampoo couldn't guess what it was. In seconds, the entire sky seemed to be engulfed in flame. Sink turned back to them and smiled viciously. Moments later, it started to rain fire and brimstone. Shampoo could only gape as the sky seemed to fall, burning ash descending from every direction with no possibility of dodging it all. Bits of it began to stick to her stealth suit, and it was hot enough to feel like burning coals even through the partly insulated armor.

Then Ranma was next to her, his arms crossed like she had seen him do before. There was some sort of distortion moving up and down his forearms, and it took a second for her to realize that everything in front of him, to his left and to his right, was being blown away by some unseen force. Then she realized what it was. She knew that Ranma had figured out how to create _hiryu shotenha_ tornados by himself, using only his own hot and cold _ki_, even though the results were weaker than if he used the hot _ki_ from an opponent. What she was seeing now was similar to that, except he had adapted the small tornados for self defense instead of as an attack.

He really was… amazing.

"Hiryu Kanshou," he said, and she could imagine the grin he had at the moment. Flying Dragon Intervention, he'd called it, one of how many variants he's come up with over the years? Even Shampoo couldn't guess.

"Looks like I'm going to need a boost to end this, and I'll have to use my own power to do it. If this doesn't work, Shampoo…" He gave her a fleeting look. "Well. You'll know what to do."

The firestorm began to die down, or at least lose its initial horrible intensity. Ranma took that as the signal to move, and move he did, covering twenty meters in an instant's time. A half dozen whips of flame lashed out to intercept him before he could get near Sink, but he unexpectedly crouched, and uppercutted. A small tornado wrapped around him, and just like she had seen him do against Saffron, he rode the winds up into the air. The fire whips tore up the ground or arched around, avoiding the twister of high speed winds.

"What!" Sink looked her eyes upward. "Why would he…?"

The fire-born cloud overhead began to split and break apart, and through the ash storms Shampoo could see Ranma, little more than a dot against the sky. The tornado he rode began to similarly break apart and dissolve, but as Ranma came into view, Shampoo saw something falling with him. It was a ball of red energy. Suddenly she remembered hearing about this attack from Mousse: the _Hiryu Kourin Dan_, or Rising Dragon Descending Bullet. Ranma had gathered the hot _ki_ that had risen into the air, accumulating it without interference, and now he was going to bring it down on his opponent's head.

She smiled, seeing his plan. "Ranma…!"

But Sink had other ideas. Flame from all around her became sucked in towards her, and with sweeping arms, she directed all her fire and fury upwards. A white hot fountain of the stuff rose up to meet Ranma, and for a moment, he looked to have been engulfed. Then Shampoo heard him over the comm..

"Hiryu Kourin Ha!!"

And Sink's pillar of fire tore apart from the inside, as Ranma's inverted descending tornado, fed by the energy he had collected, usurped its heat to feed an ever widening spiral. Sink disappeared in the winds as the head of the tornado impacted, kicking up clouds of dust and tons of earth. For a few seconds, the fate of both the Amazon Elder and her opponent couldn't be guessed, and Shampoo began to run towards the center of it all. The tornado persisted for maybe fifteen or twenty seconds before running out of steam.

As the dust settled, Shampoo peered into the twisted crater where Sink had been standing for pretty much the entire fight. She saw Sink alright, and Ranma too. The latter had landed right on top of the former, squishing her with his body. He was also face first in her bosom and splayed out over her in a position that was, Shampoo had to admit, typical of how most of Ranma's fights with women ended up, sooner or later.

A trail of smoke drifted out from between Sink's lips. She was alive.

"Ranma?" Shampoo asked with a small scowl. "Lieutenant?"

"Ugh," he grumbled, lifting the face out of Sink's apparently middle aged looking cleavage. He looked up at Shampoo, and then at how he had landed on his opponent.

"It isn't what it looks like," he said, waving his hands in the air to make sure they weren't touching anything or engaged in activities anywhere otherwise inappropriate. Then he got up, and added, "It's never what it looks like, but I'm sure I'll be blamed for it anyway."

"If you say so, Sir," Shampoo replied with a faux-professional tone of voice.

"I never thought I'd say this," Ranma said with a laugh. "But I hope that's the last fight I have for a few days."

Shampoo laughed, but he abruptly spun around and looked in a different direction: back at the Amazon village. She did the same, and saw what he had just been informed of by Command. The alien Battleship that was the source of so much of this grief had risen a hundred feet or so in the air. The four story tall flying saucer turned lazily, reorienting itself, and then a bright light filled the sky as it began to accelerate.


	63. The Twilight of the Amazons IX

-----

"I told you the other Elders were redundant," Cologne bragged, crossing the room in long, proud strides. It was just as she had promised The Mind: her pupils had potential and power far outstripping those of the other so called 'Amazon Elders.' True, those aged women had been powerful and experienced masters of The Art, but they were ultimately not in her league, and not in Ranma's or Ryouga's.

Even before the age of twenty, those two had surpassed the cream of Amazon society. It wasn't even their power and determination - what was most impressive was their ability to innovate. Ranma, especially, could adapt techniques on the fly, and during the heat of battle. Ryouga seemed to rely more in preparation beforehand, but his improvements in terms in technique (including adapting the Breaking Point to work on wood) were remarkable achievements.

They would make excellent Trenchards; she had to have them!

"This only proves it," she said, laughing all the while. "My boys were more than a match for those pathetic old fools!"

"The Mind is still not convinced you can turn them, and until they have been, those 'boys' are our worst enemies," Tofu warned, and realized where she was headed. "Please don't touch the mini-bar."

"Just a little drink!" Cologne looked at him with puppy dog eyes, in the middle of reaching into the little fridge. Of course, he was blind, anyway, so her pleading look didn't have much of an effect. Her pout quickly faded when it was clear that it wasn't working.

"No drinking either?" he shook his head in reply. "Not even some tea?" she asked, and sighed sadly, throwing herself back on the bed. "You know, Doctor, not all human traits are to be so lightly tossed aside. The Mind sees promise in us because of our humanity, not in spite of it."

"Yes," Tofu seemed to agree with a rare smile. "I'm sure that's why they've been here for the last ten thousand years. They want to know our drinking games and our recipe for jasmine tea."

Cologne just rolled her eyes and flipped on the TV.

Enjoying the fleeting human convenience while it lasted, she also found herself eagerly anticipating her next meeting with her cute little students. Cologne knew she could fight them, destroy them, if need be. But how much sweeter it would be to turn them, correct them, guide them… **and** she knew just how. To her joy, the Mind agreed. It _was_ well worth a try.

* * *

She'd half expected the battle to culminate in a showdown with some super-powerful boss alien. Instead, the frantic pace had devolved into a series of scattered low key engagements. Akane hadn't even had the opportunity to fire a single shot in anger since the Battleship took off. With plenty of time to think about it, she had decided that it was actually sort of unsettling to have the tenor and tone of combat fade away gradually, instead of reach a fever pitch and dramatically end. Twenty minutes later, Command had informed them that the battle was over and that they would be returning jurisdiction of the theater to the People's Liberation Army.

Akane's armor was a palette of red and green, slick with blood and who-knew what other alien bodily fluids. With the battle over, she had retracted her helmet's visor to get a few minutes of easy breathing, and maybe even a cool breeze or two on her face. It was refreshing up to and until she had started getting to work policing the bodies for transport and disposal. The smell was almost unbearable at first, like rotten cabbage or spoiled seafood, but she'd sucked it up and gotten on with what had to be done. Luckily, someone had thought to bring nose-plugs and had passed one of them along to everyone on 'corpse detail.' It helped.

"That's fourteen!" she said, and grunted as she tossed the limp alien body into a pile of its kin. The Snakeman hit the top, rolled past another body, and finally found a niche to relax in. The whole pile lay on top of a splayed out metal grating. When the body collection was done, or the quota for the unit reached, it would close up into a box and the local military would see to its disposal. XCOM would collect all the alien equipment, but a lot of the tedious morgue work was left to local authorities.

Akane took a deep breath, and saw the other two piles, both reserved for Chryssalids. The crab like creatures were piled high, and attracting a small cloud of tentative flies. She recalled the frenzied last minutes of battle, or what she had heard and seen of it, when the alien ship started to take off. Across the battlefield, no alien surrendered; they all fought to the last man…

Figuratively speaking.

"This is Akane Tendo," she spoke into her helmet microphone, purely for record keeping purposes. She always had to remind herself that, in English, her surname came after her given name. Knowing the foreign language had proven easier than adapting to its mannerisms. "Six Snakemen, eight Chryssalids. Permission to take a break?"

The response from regional Command took only a few seconds.

"You're cleared for a shower, Tendo."

"Thanks, Command."

Her promised 'shower' was only a short walk away. A porta-potty type thing, like the type she'd seen at outdoor fairs and construction sites, had been set up. It was larger than normal, and multipurpose. Fitting her helmet and visor back into place, she reached up, maneuvered a long metal tube overhead, and a strong jet of water began to work its magic on the gore she'd been covered in. As she understood it, some engineering type soldier had rigged the device up to the local water supply (apparently the Amazons had their own above ground isolated reservoir). Rivers of red and green flowed away from where she stood under the spray, seeping into the earth or pooling in small ponds.

As she thought about it, it occurred to her that, just a short time ago, she had balked at even touching one of the dead aliens back on the ship that had tried to abduct her family. She'd hadn't had the luxury of gloves or nose plugs back then, but now, she was confident of being able to do it herself even without those things. Back then, she hadn't liked having to foist off the job on Ryouga, though she knew he would happily help her out. It was just… she had been so disgusted, and yes: she had been afraid, too.

What normal person wouldn't have been?

Akane turned the water off after only twenty or so seconds, satisfied that her armor was back to being reasonably clean. At least it probably wouldn't stink of alien offal. Putting back her visor again, she removed the nose plugs, and took in a whiff of air. It was still a little rank, this close to the bodies and all, but it was more than bearable. Leaving that area of the camp behind, she headed towards where the survivors were being gathered.

On the way, she saw the other quadrants of the camp: there was collection, where all the alien devices captured were being identified, marked, sorted, and inventoried. There was another area where all the human bodies were being collected and identified, behind a makeshift shade to obscure the dead from the living, and then there was the area set aside for the survivors themselves (except from the ones up north, who had already been moved out).

All together, there were maybe thirty or forty, almost all of which were from the Phoenix Tribe. She saw a few familiar faces, too, and headed towards them. Waving to get their attention, she called out to the two boys.

"Mousse! Ryouga!" she yelled, and the two turned in her direction. "Hey!"

"Akane Tendo," Mousse replied in a droll tone. "You seem well."

"Akane." Ryouga inclined his head in greeting, and motioned with his hand at the two other soldiers standing nearby. "You remember Lime and Mint, right?"

"How could I forget?" Akane's tone turned icy when she did, finally, recognize the two Musk warriors.

"Sorry about touching your… ah…" Lime smiled sheepishly. "You know…"

Akane frowned. She'd been kidnapped by quite a few loony martial artist types since she'd gotten engaged to Ranma, but only Lime had actually felt her up. The Musk raised their sons away from women, and as Ranma had later explained (bragging about how he'd overcome the mighty Dragon Prince Herb) that this was also their weakness: any mention of women, girls, or breasts in general instantly seized their attention and distracted them. That they were probably more curious than strictly lecherous had crossed her mind, but she was still angry and humiliated by the short ordeal.

Even with him wearing a large set of personal armor, Akane could see and remember Lime's face. He had acute cat-like eyes that were too strongly slanted to pass as human. His ears were vaguely pointed, like some anime-characters she'd seen before who were supposed to be elves or something, and his hair was ink black. He looked to be in his early twenties.

Mint, on the other hand, looked to be barely seventeen or eighteen. His eyes looked human enough, but his hair was an even stronger shade of dark blue than Akane's own. Strangely, it abruptly changed color past his ears, becoming tawny, giving him the appearance of wearing a fur cap or the like. He also had his helmet completely off, and she could see his pointed dog-like ears. Most people would have passed off his appearance as intricate cosplay, except in Mint's case, the ears were real.

The two boys were from the Musk Tribe, or Musk Dynasty – a small sect of martial artists who used Jyusenkyou to gain the powers of animals. They used a cursed spring to turn animals into women. In Mint's case, it was a wolf, and in Lime's, a tiger. Herb's ancestor was supposedly a dragon. The children from these unions, apparently always male, inherited animalistic traits and abilities. Mint was super fast, supposedly faster than even Ranma when it came to body motion, and she had heard that Lime was superhumanly strong, even by the standard of people who could lift and throw cars at each other. Herb's power was greater still, as he possessed a superhuman level of _ki _control.

Akane crossed her arms over her chest and gave them a stern look. "I just hope you two have gotten over this whole thing you have with girls by now."

"We sure did!" Mint replied with a fierce blush. "Prince Herb got sick of us bothering him, so he helped us find girlfriends!"

"Really!" Akane brightened at that. "That's great! Good for you!"

"I already told you…" Mousse interrupted while pushing up his glasses and letting them glint in a properly sinister fashion. "A prostitute is not a _girlfriend_. There are different responsibilities involved."

Her face fell. "What?!"

"Hmm. Hmm." Mint cupped his chin and closed his eyes, pondering what the Chinese boy had said. "You explained it before, but I don't know…"

"I don't see the difference either," Lime added.

Akane was on the verge of hitting them, she really was, when Ryouga cleared his throat.

"We should change the subject," he suggested. Mousse just chuckled at the whole scenario. The lost one nudged his friend, prompting him to cease the evil sounding laughter, and returned his attention to her.

"This was your first taste of combat," he said, and gave her a long look. "Did you like it, Akane?"

She huffed at the pointed question, and answered honestly, "It was scary. I was scared, but I did what I had to. What I agreed to do. What was right. That's all."

Mousse seemed to find her reply amusing. In a friendly gesture she had never expected to come from the rather introverted Hidden Weapons Master, he punched her lightly on the shoulder and smiled.

"You're one of us now!" he declared.

"One of you?" she asked, and looked from Mousse to Ryouga, who smiled wryly and nodded. Even Lime and Mint were smiling and looking congratulatory. If only Ranma had been there, too, agreeing with those words… it would have been perfect.

"Thanks," she settled on saying, and bowed her head a little, and only for a second or so. "I hope all my missions won't be this… eventful."

"Shame that stupid ship got away," Lime grumbled, looking up at the sky as if it were still hovering overhead. "I was looking forward to cracking it open."

The other men exchanged agreements. Akane knew the plan was to take the Battleship, too, but she couldn't say she was eager to be part of storming it.

"Well, look on the bright side," she said, trying to sound lackadaisically casual. "How many could have possibly gotten away? We beat these guys, even though we were outnumbered. We won, and they ran away."

"Did we win?" Mousse asked, and he looked off towards the survivors and beyond them, the Amazon village to the southwest. "I don't think any of them will be celebrating tonight. I think... maybe…"

"We lost today," Ryouga finished, a grim look clouding his features. "But we'll run into that ship again. It won't get away next time."

"What was it Master Herb said?" Lime asked, turning to Mint. "A... A pyr…"

"A Pyrrhic Victory," Mint remembered, and the larger Musk warrior nodded slowly at that, though he probably didn't really understand what the term meant.

"Akane," he then turned back to her. "Have you gotten stronger?"

She smiled up at Lime, probably the strongest human being on the planet.

"Yeah. I think I have."

* * *

"So: Saffron has been abducted."

Ranma stared at Herb with an angry expression. "Blunt, much?"

Herb shrugged, hardly caring either way. The two of them were only present because they knew the injured woman standing defiantly before them. Her name was Kiima, warlord of the Phoenix Tribe. Or what was left of it. Herb had heard about Ranma's little run in with the Phoenix, and about Saffron's defeat at the hands of the pigtailed Japanese fighter. It was an impressive feat: the warriors of that tribe were quite weak and primitive, though Kiima herself was fairly competent, but Saffron… he was on a whole different level. If Ranma had beaten that creature, even with the aid of a magical artifact, then he had improved.

His own knowledge of Kiima was similarly professional. The woman, with her pure white hair and savage beauty, had been one of the prime candidates selected to be his mate and wife. The Phoenix themselves had come to him with the proposition, given that Kiima was the most highly skilled woman to emerge from their ranks in centuries, and that her services would no longer be needed once Saffron matured. That situation had changed when Ranma killed Saffron, forcing him to revert back into an infant. Kiima was once again bound to be the boy's caretaker, and the engagement was canceled.

In the end, it hardly mattered to the Dragon Prince who he married – all women were basically the same, and all could fulfill the purposes he had for them. There were other strong and beautiful women to sire the next in the line. It was simply a matter of sorting through them and discerning the most suitable surrogate.

"This Saffron person…?" The one who spoke just then was Colonel Butler, who Herb had sworn to fight for. And, in a military sense, under. It was a useful alliance of convenience to work for UNETCO, gaining influence and experience and technology. The Musk were a scattered people, with no ties to land or any of the responsibilities it entailed. In the past, many, even Princes, had fought as mercenaries. The enemies in this case were also inhuman, which made slaying them all the more satisfying and rewarding. It would be fine tale to distinguish him from his forebears.

"According to the reports by you two," Butler continued, speaking primarily to Herb. "He's some sort of, what, half-Phoenix? Like you're half-Dragon or somesuch?"

"He is a result of mixing springs and curses," Herb answered casually, more than willing to clear up the so called mystery. He wasn't naturally talkative by nature, but he was thorough. If the Colonel wanted an explanation, then Herb would give it. If not, then he would refrain. Herb liked to think of it as a pragmatic approach. In truth, he rather liked lecturing others, but he didn't want to appear to be looking for the opportunity to do so.

"It was an experiment on the part of my forefathers. A Prince of our line managed to create a spring of drowned Phoenix without the creature itself, by instead using a divine icon. The result was much like the Spring of Drowned Asura that can be found here at Jyusenkyou. He then took his intended wife, cursed her to turn into a Phoenix, locked her in that form, and then once again splashed her with drowned woman water. The child he bore with that woman became the First Saffron."

"So you guys are like cousins or something?" Ranma interrupted.

"Yes. In a fashion," Herb replied, and snorted disdainfully. "In the end, he was a bastard of our lineage. No true Musk would attempt to lord over people as he has. Such things are of no interest to us."

"So he is like you," Captain Banks said, and looked over at Kiima, who had been silent this entire time. She didn't speak English, and the two Colonels didn't speak Japanese. Someone had to have been left out of the loop, and it had to be her. Herb made an annoyed huffing sound at the Captain's assertion, taking it as something of an insult, but he didn't disagree.

"While we try and keep world leaders from being abducted as a general rule, why is this guy different?" Captain Banks guessed, "Is he some kind of martial artist?"

"Saffron isn't a martial artist, sir," Ranma answered quickly, and made an exploding motion with his hands. "He's like a nuclear bomb, or a nuclear reactor, maybe. He radiates heat… When I fought him he was able to melt rock. A lot of it. Plus, he can regenerate himself. I saw him tear off his own wings and throw 'em."

"Regeneration is new. And this pyrokinesis?" Banks asked. "Is it like that woman you brought in?"

"Much more powerful," Ranma insisted.

"Do you have any numbers? Any scale?" Colonel Butler asked, scratching his chin.

Ranma grimaced; numbers weren't one of his specialties. "There's no way to know…"

"I know," Herb announced, and blinked as they all stared at him expectantly.

"You… know?" Ranma asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Of course," Herb replied with an arrogant smirk. "Unlike some people, I have had an extensive education in both the esoteric arts and the modern world. I was not exaggerating when I told you there are few things relating to _ki_ that I do not know. If I were to make a rough approximation, Colonel, I would say Saffron has an ideal output of around ten kilowatts – that being heat and light, not electricity or kinetic energy."

"Is that a lot?" Ranma asked, and frowned, feeling out of his element.

"Normally, it is not," Herb coolly answered. "However, as you no doubt saw in your battle with him, Saffron's power is finite but quite vast. Ten kilowatts over a span of sixty years can become some fifteen gigawatts over a span of twenty minutes."

Ranma's expression brightened as he got it. "That's right! He did say something about burning himself out and not having much time to kill me…"

"Fighting you _is_ rather aggravating. I can't imagine who would want to drag it out," Herb dryly noted, and shrugged again at Ranma's incredulous scowl. "Saffron's normal energy output should be comparable to my own, and while his peak output is much greater… he is only capable of manifesting that energy as heat and light. As an absolute maximum, I would say his special techniques can not have a thermal output of more than sixty or seventy gigajoules."

"You do realize that is an insane amount of energy," Captain Banks replied, shaking his head. "Don't you?"

"It's enough to blast the top of a Mountain off," Ranma said, and the others turned to him. "He did that during our fight."

Butler massaged his forehead as the thought worked its way through his mind. "Jesus…"

"Excuse me…?" Kiima asked, but it was in Japanese, so only Ranma and Herb understood her. "What are you talking about?"

"Your missing boy King," he said, switching briefly to Chinese, and held up his hand. "I will explain the details later."

Ranma looked from him, to Kiima, and then back again, some unspoken idea developing in his mind. Herb sighed again. Whatever idea the pigtailed martial artists got, it was almost certain to be inaccurate… or inconvenient. He involuntarily scowled at the Special Lieutenant as Ranma's smile grew wider and wider.

"Wait a sec! YOU!" he pointed at the Dragon Prince, and then used his thumb to indicate Kiima. "And…?!"

"No," Herb cut him off, and the other Lieutenant deflated. Herb wanted to shake his head in disbelief. Even accounting for the interference of Ranma's friends, how had he, the Great Lord Herb, been beaten by this fool?

"I'll fight you for the juicy details if I have to…" Ranma warned, still smiling, and still annoying Herb more than anyone else he had ever met.

"That's an awfully familiar tone you're taking with me," he growled. "You…"

"Lieutenants!" Colonel Butler barked, and the two froze in mid-confrontation. "Stow it!"

"Yes, sir!" Ranma snapped back.

Herb inclined his head respectfully. "Of course."

"This is just one more wonderful little revelation," Captain Banks anxiously scratched his scalp through his thick hair. "Now, on top of everything else, the aliens have this little nuclear powered freak in their hands. This is just wonderful."

"It is a bit of a mess," Butler agreed, though with markedly less passion. He seemed to be taking the problems in stride. "All right. You two see to this… bird woman. Make sure you've got all the info you need out of her, and come up with arrangements for relocation. This area isn't secure. Banks, you're with me. Command is waiting for a status report."

Captain Banks nodded.

"Sir! Colonel Sir," Ranma spoke up, just before either of the older men could leave. "What about Saffron? What should I tell her? He's… very important to her, sir."

Colonel Butler grinned like a shark. "This kid brings himself back from death, right? So tell her not to worry."

The two senior officers headed off to discuss things privately, and report back to Commander Yasuda. They'd appropriated a nearby building, once someone's house, to have the 'Saffron matter' cleared up. Herb and Ranma looked down at Kiima, ho had taken a seat nearby, and the slightly older woman looked back up at them. When she had been found, she was unconscious, stunned by the alien invaders. By the sound of her story, she hadn't even been able to do more than unsheathe her sword. The mist she described, and the lingering traces of chemicals in her bloodstream, were both consistent with the use of an alien medical launcher. The aliens used it for knocking out problematic creatures, usually during abductions.

But it had also saved her life.

The aliens hadn't shot any of the Phoenix warriors or civilians that they had stunned. In fact, they had stunned a great many and left them behind, but many had also been given the chance to fight, and had instead been mowed down by plasma blasts. From her story, the aliens had made a bee line for two targets: the infant Saffron's chambers, and the artifact storehouse. Predictably, they had stolen the Kinjakan, the ancient weapon and key to releasing Saffron's mature powers.

"You were careless to dismiss the foreigners," Herb said, not caring one whit that it wouldn't make her feel any better. "A wise warrior assimilates all the powers of the world, not just those belonging to his kin."

Kiima glared at him with fiery eyes, her look of morbid dejection momentarily put aside. "Easy for a nomadic mercenary like you to say! We Phoenix have to protect our own and our land!"

"But you couldn't, could you?" he smirked cruelly. "Still… maybe you'll do better next time."

Kiima was on the verge of standing back up and doing something foolish, when she caught herself, and calmed down. Staring off at one of the walls, she asked, "Next time?"

Herb's smirk never faded. "Next time."

"You know," Ranma interrupted, draping a too-casual arm over Herb's shoulders in a friendly (too friendly) manner. "I'm supposed to be the confident one here. But whatever! How hard could this be, anyway? Once we break into their little hideout and kill everything that moves, we'll just wait and see if there are any HUGE eggs lying around. Bingo! Pay dirt!"

Kiima laughed, just a little, and Ranma smiled down at her.

"Right now, more than ever, your people are gonna need you to lead 'em," Ranma insisted, and Kiima slowly nodded. Herb could see that, somehow, Ranma had cheered her up a bit. The womanizer was good at his craft, the Dragon Prince supposed. The pigtailed one then leaned in closer to her and gestured at said Musk warrior turned soldier in a less than subtle or courtly manner.

"So what's going on with him, huh? There something between you two?"

Herb growled, but Kiima laughed.

"We were almost married," she replied blithely, as if it was nothing at all. "A political marriage. _Luckily_, it was called off after someone turned Saffron back into a baby. Not to mention my Jyusenkyou curse… I'm sure that's a turn off to someone from a family like his."

Herb's temper was bordering on stormy.

"That's right, you turn into Akane!" Ranma'd tone of voice was light, but he was frowning a bit at the memory. "Funny that… that you come out looking like Akane herself, you know, instead of just a random girl like me and Herb here."

"Don't you know anything?" Herb seized the opportunity to show up the annoying Japanese martial artist. "The pool you and I fell into is special. My ancestors made it so that the spring turned those who fell into it into female human versions of the original, instead of a specific person. That is why there is a drowned man spring and a different drowned 'virtuous man' spring... Are you even listening?"

"Yeah," Ranma replied, clearly lost in thought. He had a serious expression, and his grey blue eyes took on a steely tone. "The curse reflects the one who falls in it… but if a normal person is drowned, the new spring copies them…"

"Yesss…." Herb narrowed his own crimson colored eyes, unsure where the fool was going with this. "What of it?"

"Just… thinking about how the aliens ignored my old man back in Nerima. And how Mousse and Shampoo escaped…" To Herb's surprise, Ranma was starting to make sense. "The aliens must have scanned the area from their ship. They had Ryouga's memories, too, so they must've known about the curses."

Ranma asked another question, "Could a Jyusenkyou curse confuse a mind probe?"

Now Herb's red eyes glowed dangerously with an inner fire. "We'll need some hot water."

"Wait." Ranma held up his hand, and slowly lowered it as an idea came to him. He turned to stare at Kiima, who seemed mostly confused by the topic of discussion. "I think I have a better idea."


	64. Justice Machine I

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. The UNETCO timetable moves ever forward, but a new complication has arisen as the alien forces in the Far East surge out in unexpected numbers and with surprising fury. India and Juliet Squads have taken the _Procyon_, a cargo ship operated by the alien enthralled Sirius Group, and uncovered the existence of a terrible chemical weapon based on Chryssalid Venom. But already the Amazon Village has been made a martyr – the first field test of a weapon the Sirius Group hopes to use against the city of Singapore. With the battle for the Amazon Village over, it is finally time to settle accounts.

* * *

**Hong Kong**

Wang Goufu ran like his life depended on it. Rounding the corner, he bumped into an elderly man, pushed him roughly out of the way, and tried desperately to keep his stride. Looming between and above the smaller buildings that lined both sides of the road he could see the towering capitalist monuments on Hong Kong Island and the central districts. He thought, not for the first time, about heading for one of the rail lines, but he had no idea what the train schedule was like, and the idea of standing around waiting for a subway car filled him with dread.

Shoving his way through the crowded street, he weaved around pedestrians going about their business on the busy market street. A vendor and a young woman cursed him in stereo as he ran by; knocking newly purchased waxpaper-wrapped food out of the latter's hands. Wang's heart was still racing, and he ignored them, pushing on down the street. Taking advantage of a group of people making a street crossing, he ran by in parallel, daring a glance behind to look for any pursuers.

He slowed only a moment, took stock of where he was near a street sign, and took off again as fast as his tired legs could manage. He made a right turn onto another busy street, and stuck to the overhangs that jutted out from the buildings, providing much needed shade to passersby. He paused again, looked up, and then back. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, aside from the glares he was receiving from one or two people he'd bumped into.

Ducking into an alley, he tested the door to an adjacent restaurant. Someone had recently taken out the trash, and the door was open. He thanked the gods for his luck, and snuck in. He tried to act casual, but after a few seconds, he threw aside most of his caution and ran through the kitchen and out the back, enduring more cursing from restaurant staff, one of whom threatened to call the police.

'You do that!' Wang thought, as he came out the back entrance, noted the parked bikes there, and headed off in another direction. He wasn't exactly afraid of the police. Hell, under circumstances like this, he'd almost have welcomed them!

He was in the back alleys now, and for a minute, he lost his bearings. Finding a main street, he quickly realized where he was, took a deep breath, and headed across the road, waiting for the traffic to calm enough for him to run across. He was growing more confident now, and tried to blend in with a large crowd of shoppers. He even hung out near the front of one of the stores, though his anxious behavior – looking back and forth and behind – surely must have seemed unusual to those nearby and inside. His breathing slowed, and he caught his breath as he walked only a little too fast down the street.

It was just a little further ahead…

Hastily heading down another street, Wang Goufu began to laugh nervously. He was just a speck, just a dot, just one more person on the streets of the most crowded piece of land on Earth. It wasn't hard to disappear in a sea of people here in Kwun Tong. The safe house had a decorative façade that filled Wang with familiar relief. They wouldn't turn him away, not him, and not in his time of need. He'd be safe here from that psycho.

Expressing his hurry in words, he made his way past the front desk, and then past the guards who blocked public entrance to the upper levels of the establishment. He saw few familiar faces, but many who were his brothers and compatriots. Occasional friendly glances filled him with palpable solace, and he took a minute to duck into a bathroom and fix his hair and attire. It wouldn't do to look like some un-presentable and un-professional street thug!

Splashing his face and quickly drying it off with a paper towel, he headed up the final flight of stairs to the top level of the building. Behind a set of well guarded doors, Wang Goufu entered a room clouded with the taste and smell of smoke. There were six men in the large room, two were personal bodyguards standing next to the man Wang had come to see. Two others were sitting at the table in front of that man, playing cards. The third was at a notebook laptop computer. Two scantily clad women in thigh revealing dressed hovered nearby with drinks and a tray of food.

"Boss!" Goufu barked, bowing his head stiffly. "Thank you for seeing me! I… I…"

The man in charge sat silently at the head of the table.

Wang composed himself, and cleared his throat. "Boss… my subordinates… they're dead."

"Dead?" the man asked, dark eyes leaving the unfolding card game and focusing on his nervous deputy. He was an older man with the mannerisms of a gentleman, and hearing that some of his subordinates had been killed obviously struck a cord with his sense of Triad honor.

"Who was it?" he asked darkly.

Wang licked his lips. "It was… some crazy bitch vigilante or something. She killed my boys, she… she said she was after me. That I had to pay. Hell if I know for what!"

Goufu watched his Boss' face for any sign that he would be punished or, worse, thrown out on his own. The chick was loony tunes, that was for sure. She had to have the wrong guy, too – he'd never killed anyone's family or any shit like that. Maybe he'd helped forge and distribute some bad passport and residency papers, or maybe this was some angry kid from an indentured family overseas? Even then, it wasn't the sort of thing he'd ever expected would lead him to the pointy end of a vendetta. The Boss' eyes narrowed, the folds of skin behind his glasses crinkling up.

"A vigilante is it?"

The Boss' expression was hard and unforgiving as he spoke. Wang was silently relieved; he was safe now, and when the boys got through with that crazy bitch, they'd…

It was in the middle of that line of thought that the ceiling caved in.

Wang fell back on his ass as the already cloudy room filled with smoke from smashed drywall and insulation. The beautiful wooden table in the middle of the room had been smashed in, and so had one of the men sitting at it. The lights flickered, but no one seemed to recover from the shock long enough to say anything, save for the two female attendants who screamed and ran for cover. Instead, a single figure seemed to glide in from the hole in the roof.

Shan Pu wrenched her twenty four kilogram _bonbori _mace out of the ruined remains of one of the mobster's faces. She glared at the man she'd followed, then to the one near the smashed table, then to the one at the computer, and then finally the one sitting between two bodyguards. The men all reached for their guns and knives. Shampoo effortlessly raised her bloody weapon out to shoulder level and smiled ferally.

They didn't know it at the moment, but all six of them were dead men.

"Nihao."

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia **

Chapter XXII

_Justice Machine _

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

Ukyou stared at Shinzo Abe's signature with a mixture of shock and awe. She'd never seen what would properly be called a "License to Kill" before, even though she had had the state sanctioned authority to take human lives since at least the inception of Operation Winter Triangle. It was a rather plain looking legal document, Japanese on one side, and an English translation on the other, stamped with two official looking seals. One of which, if she was reading it correctly, was the Imperial Chrysanthemum Seal itself.

A little numbly, she added her own humble signature to a line on the bottom.

It was just one of a half dozen similarly worded documents. In her hands and laid out on the table in front of her, were no less than eight signed executive orders granting her the authority to act with effective legal immunity _in cooperation_ with federal authorities. It was _carte blanche_ immunity from prosecution across virtually all of East Asia.

'In the interests of collective national security… of the member states…' she mused about exactly what that meant. It was like all these people, these important, powerful people, were all handing her this authority and responsibility. It was different from before, just being ordered to fight, or being given permission to engage in a little corporate and domestic spying. Before her were papers giving her power, not just over potentially legions of rank and file national security agencies and "assets" but over life and death itself. These were leaders who knew she was probably going to enter _their_ country and kill or detain _their_ citizens, and that she would be using _their_ own people as help.

What was really unsettling was that, just a few months ago, as a citizen of Japan, her life could have been signed away just as easily. It was a lot of power, almost scary once she had thought more about it, but she really seemed to be the only one hesitating or showing concern. Next to her, Shampoo and Konatsu had already finished signing their papers. Ranma was on his last one, gnawing tastefully on his pen as he read something.

India Squad seemed to have a smaller pile of papers before them; Ukyou could assume that they'd already been given a License to Kill in at least a few countries, probably Japan, Korea and China. They had all finished signing their papers as well, though Mousse had taken to squinting at some of the fine print on one and comparing it to another. The naturally nearly blind martial artist elbowed Ryouga, who had been sitting next to him, and whispered something while pointing at said document. Kuno was cleaning his nails, and Ryu was calmly drinking a glass of water. He also seemed to notice Ukyou was staring at him, and smiled.

She sighed under her breath, and quickly attached her name to the papers as was necessary. The documents were from South Korea and Laos, Russia and the Philippines and others. Only her knowledge of English allowed her some glimpse of what they all meant. Waiting for her (and Ranma) to finish, Noriko Yasuda sat at the head of the meeting table. She was angry, not so much with them, but with the situation. Ukyou could tell she was the type who spoke less when they were enraged, instead of more.

They had only just gotten back to Seiran, having time only for a quick shower and a change of clothes. They had debriefed – a surprisingly smooth process when said Commander had video and audio recordings of the entire mission from everyone's perspective – and been summarily handed a brown manila folder and a paper clipped set of papers. Apparently, they wouldn't be relaxing here at the base for long. Ukyou wasn't sour about that; she was mentally and physically exhausted, but she understood the situation. Time was of the absolute essence.

Seeing that everyone was done, Yasuda nodded once; she already had everyone's attention. Even Kuno had stopped fussing with his nails and faced the head of the table. The atmosphere at Seiran Mountain was antiseptic and a welcome relief from the chaos and brutality of the battlefield.

"You can leave the papers here," the Commander began, cupping her hands in front of her. Her dark brown eyes were virtually amber with pent up rage. Ukyou reflected on the fact that it was a fairly common emotion within the organization: most everyone hated not just the aliens, but anything that aided and abetted them. Most, she could assume, had simply _seen too much_ to feel any sympathy for the enemy.

"Inside those folders are your new orders," Yasuda said with an icy tone that belied her true feelings. "You will be working with local law enforcement and national security organizations. You have permission to requisition any non-xeno technology, and use all your abilities to their utmost in the pursuit of your targets. Do whatever it takes. We've let this problem fester for too long. Domestic and international law enforcement is already on the job, but we have plans for our own coordinated strike in roughly twenty eight hours."

"Commander," Ukyou spoke up with a quick question. "How reliable, I mean cooperative, can we expect… ah… the locals to be?"

Yasuda acknowledged the legitimate concern. "We have worked with all these security agencies before. You will be paired with proven and reliable personnel. I recommend you take advantage of their experience."

"What about the media?" Ryu asked, looking up from the papers peeking out of the top of his manila folder. "Some of this looks like it could get messy."

Commander Yasuda smirked confidently. "We already have Counterintelligence working that angle. You will all be issued Scramblers as well, to take care of cell phones, digital cameras, and other nuisances."

There was scattered mumbling around the table, but everyone seemed ready and eager to take the fight to those responsible for the tragedy at the Amazon Village. Ukyou read over her own mission orders, along with profiles of the local contacts and officials she would be working with. As martial artists there were there mostly to make sure nothing got out of control, and to see that everything went according to plan. The local agents would be doing most of the actual work.

"Are there any other questions at the moment?" Noriko waited a few seconds, and when no one spoke up, she nodded shrewdly. "Good. I realize this is all taking place on short notice, and that you all just came back from a difficult mission… Hell, two missions. But your expertise is needed. Rest up and get ready to ship out."

"Yes, sir!" All eight martial artists echoed, stood, and saluted.

Commander Yasuda uncapped her hands and smiled warmly at them. "Dismissed."

They filed out with stern faces, clutching their orders like shields… or swords. Ukyou felt angry, too, just thinking about what these _people_ had done to the Amazons, and what they wanted to do to Singapore. They _would_ pay, and so would the aliens that they worshipped. She couldn't imagine a world she wanted to live in that had people like them in it – but at the same time, there was a little nagging voice in the back of her mind that was slightly disturbed by how casually UNETCO manhandled the press and individual human rights, even in the good and noble cause of 'collective national security.'

None of those nagging misgivings, however, would deter her from her duty.

Outside the conference room, Juliet Squad instinctively came together. Ukyou found herself watching Shampoo for any signs of mental fatigue after the Amazon Village ordeal. Konatsu was amiable as always, smiling and friendly and eager to please. Ranma seemed to be calm and in control, and while he usually tried to give off that sort of image of himself, this time she knew he meant it. He was their leader, and he knew what to do. Shampoo had a deadly serious expression in contrast, and by the way she clenched and unclenched her free hand, Ukyou could tell she was physically and emotionally tense.

"No training today, guys," Ranma addressed them, not at their friend or fiancé (former fiancé, Ukyou had to remind herself), but as Special Lieutenant Saotome. "We'll meet up again tonight at… eighteen hundred hours. If you're not sleeping or eating, I want you familiarizing yourself with your upcoming mission, ok?"

"Yes sir!" Konatsu chirped. The two girls just nodded their compliance.

"Alright then," Ranma concluded, and motioned for Shampoo. "Walk with me, Shampoo. I'd like to talk about something."

The two headed off, and despite herself, Ukyou found herself feeling just a little jealous. It was irrational, and she knew it, and after a few seconds it was gone. Anything Ranma had to talk to Shampoo about on duty was mission related, and almost certainly nothing personal. Besides, she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Ranma wasn't interested in a relationship with any of them – not the sort of relationship they had been badgering him about for two years, anyway.

"Miss Ukyou?" Konatsu looked at her with curious eyes.

"Sure," she replied to the unspoken question, and the two of them walked together through the halls. They didn't really talk, instead just sort of silently being company for one another. Ukyou took the time to skim over just what sort of work she would be involved in and where.

" Malaysia?" she wondered aloud. She let out a small laugh. "Well, I always did sort of want to see the world."

" Philippines," Konatsu said, referring to his assignment. " Subic Bay."

"Never even heard of it," Ukyou admitted.

"It looks like the place where the Procyon picked up those poor people they tested their poison on," he replied, neatly putting the papers back into their envelope. "I intend to find out as much as I can before I go. As for the job itself…"

"Wetwork?"

The ex-ninja nodded, but then shrugged. "Depends."

"Still, it doesn't sound too hard!" Ukyou ribbed him in a friendly manner. "They've got me searching boats all day with the coast guard."

Konatsu smiled at her, and she almost shook her head at how "bishy" he was, or so her old female friends back at Furinkan would have called it. He had that hint of femininity to him that the other martial arts boys she knew, namely Ranma and Ryouga, Mousse and Ryu and Kuno, lacked. Those guys never gave the impression of a carefully groomed appearance (even Kuno), and despite being called it by girls behind their backs, Ukyou would never really put them into the category of 'beautiful man.' Konatsu was, and she had always found it more than a little off putting.

Men were supposed to be rough: more like coal than polished diamond. That was the impression she had gotten from her father at least, and her admittedly less than normal upbringing. A man couldn't be spineless or vacillating; he had to be dominant and overpowering and distinctly un-feminine. Ukyou had thought many times about telling Konatsu just that, but a part of her didn't want him to try and make him into something he wasn't. She had dressed like a boy and denied who and what she was for years, but for all his… queer tastes in clothes and mannerisms, Konatsu was still a boy. He had never renounced his masculinity; he just needed to find someone who would accept him despite his quirks.

'Or better yet, get him to beat Shampoo in a fight…'

"Miss Ukyou…" he began to say, and hesitated.

So she gave him a little nudge. "What's up?"

"I just… I've been thinking, you know, ever since our fight." He made a soft sigh, demurely hiding his lips behind his hand.

'Like a girl,' Ukyou couldn't help but think. 'Does he really feel comfortable acting like that, or is it just his engrained kunoichi training?'

"You've gotten much stronger, Miss Ukyou. So much stronger, but you're still kind and determined and…" he shook his head, and frowned. When he did that, at least, his features became sharper and most distinctly male. "And you know."

She did.

"Konatsu…"

"But," he interrupted her. "But as much as I wish it… I don't we can walk the same path for much longer."

That caught her by surprise. She turned around, took a few steps back, took a good look at him. He seemed to be totally serious. Realizing that, she felt a conflicting mixture of relief and disappointment. Even if it was unreciprocated, it felt good to know that someone… felt that way about you, especially when the person you loved didn't seem to feel the same way. As the saying went: 'misery loves company.'

"I don't think…" he closed his eyes and turned away, partly hiding his face. "I don't think we knew the real Ukyou and Konatsu. All this… after all this, it's made me realize something: I was using you. I was using you as an excuse to not go home; as a crutch not to go back to being what I used to be. As long as I told myself I was working for you and being with you, then I didn't have to actually go anywhere. It was… it was…"

"It was like being with my step-sisters," he confessed, and Ukyou could see the admission pained him. "And I was happy, because you were kinder than they were, and you never made me… do objectionable things. I never thought I could do anything good, anything worthwhile, with my talents… I didn't want to be put into any sort of situation where I would have to fight."

"But our fight… opened my eyes…" He looked at her, dark eyes moist. "Your passion for the Art enhances your lifestyle. I want that, too, but I don't think I can unless I finally try out life for myself."

She took his hand in her own, and gave it a firm squeeze. "Believe me: I understand how you feel. I do."

"I know you do." He squeezed her hand back, but more gently. "That's why it's so sad. You're still my closest friend, Miss Ukyou."

"Konatsu," she said, and looked into his eyes. "When we fought, I realized just how amazing my opponent really was. He was a strong, proud guy who wanted, more than anything, to be accepted for who he was. Do you know what I thought at the end, when I drew out my ki to attack him? I thought: how happy I was to fight someone I respected, and someone who, without pretense, challenged me to be more than I was."

He gave her hand one last embrace, and then they let go.

"Thank you, Miss Ukyou…" He bowed his head slightly. "For taking me in and… for being a friend when I needed one most."

They hugged, just briefly, but it was more than enough time for the typical Nerima luck to kick in. The sound of a loud 'crunch!' drew their attention to a couple doors down, where a man with a rough beard had just taken a loud bite out of an apple. For a few seconds, the three of them stood in silence.

"Ahem!" Ukyou and Konatsu quickly parted, and brushed themselves off, as if the embarrassment were clinging to their clothes instead of simply saturating the air. The bearded man took another loud bite out of the red Fuji apple.

"Hmmmm…." He mused, taking another loud bite.

"Don't get any ideas, old man!" Ukyou barked and stomping her foot impertinently. Kazuo Kuonji's fatherly grin only widened, as if to ask, 'Who? Me?'

"No!" She preemptively scolded him, and walking up to the older man, she pointed back at her squad mate. "This is Konatsu. We're Friends. Just friends!"

Said ninja-boy gave a small wave. "Hi."

Kazou took another enigmatic bite out of his apple, saying nothing. Never the most patient of people, especially with regard to those who jerked her around, Ukyou fumed, made a loud 'ooooohhh!' like howl, and disappeared into her room. In her wake, the two men stood and stared.

"Just friends, huh?" Kazuo asked, casually.

"Yes, sir." Konatsu put on his most sunny smile. "Good friends."

Kazuo considered that, and slowly asked, "Aren't you the one who threw some six hundred or so throwing knives at my daughter?"

"Actually, sir…" Konatsu cleared his throat. "They were _shuriken_."

"Ooooh?" the older man replied, and took another big bite out of his apple, reducing it to nearly a core. Chewing slowly, he smiled wanly and looked to Ukyou's closed door.

"That's good, then," he concluded. "I think she needs friends right now, not… boyfriends."

Konatsu found himself agreeing, though secretly he'd have really liked to have kissed her, at least once. You didn't have an infatuating crush on a girl for almost a year and not think about it, even if the relationship stopped before it really got started. He was as manly as any guy when it came to things like that. Konatsu wondered about Ranma, though, given how many girls threw themselves at _his_ feet.

Kazuo chuckled to himself. "You know, for a second there, I almost mistook you for that Tsubasa boy."

"Actually," Konatsu helpfully provided, "He left town a few months ago to become a runway model."

The elder Kuonji raised a slightly disturbed eyebrow.

Konatsu made a disgusted face, too. "Not something I like to think much about either, sir."

* * *

Tsubasa Kurenai pivoted on his heel, allowing the frills of the sexy black dress to swirl around his ankles. The strobe light flash of cameras came from all around him, and he flashed a marvelous smile to all his adoring fans. He'd never felt so beautiful! Sauntering backstage, he let out a relieved breath, and clutched his hands together under his chin in an exaggerated cutesy-fashion. To most anyone watching, he must've seemed like one of the prettiest brunettes they'd ever seen.

"Oh, Ukyou-sama, soon I'll be a super star!" He laughed to himself in a distinctly un-feminine fashion. "And we all know women can't resist famous guys!"

* * *

Back in their rooms, Konatsu and Kazou both shivered. Even Ukyou felt a disturbance in the planet's **ki** – as if a thousand men and women were about to cry out in disgust. Then she realized it was probably nothing, and certainly nothing related to her, and went back to sleep.

Tomorrow was looking to be another… interesting day.

* * *

**Primorsky Krai****Russia**

A light mid day flurry began to fall over the dense woodlands flanking a single stretch of road. The sky was an ever shifting palette of blue and creamy white, clouds racing one another across the open air. The trees were still lightly frosted from the last snowfall, and the newly swirling flakes of white added a sense of energy and anxious anticipation to the normally tranquil scenery.

Roman Basilevsky listened intently, as the report from recon came in.

Nearby, a dozen armed men from the FSB (the _Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti_ or Federal Security Service) waited for their quarry. Hidden among the trees and bushes on a nearby ridge overlooking the road were yet more men; they were trained snipers and veterans of counterterrorist actions in the Northern Caucasus. Roman's superiors had taken this little cooperative operation very seriously, and had requisitioned substantial manpower towards it.

"Things look good," Roman said, speaking to the one foreigner in their midst. He was the one they were 'cooperating' with. Luckily, Roman was proficient in the American brand of English, and he had worked with Americans before. This was an important mission, and his superiors had immediately recognized Roman Basilevsky as a good man to entrust it with.

"You can speak Russian, you know," the man replied, watching the road with his hands tucked into the pockets of his parka. He tilted his head, and gave Roman a frown that none-the-less seemed professionally courteous.

"After all, I went to some trouble to learn it," the man added. "I wanted to put everyone at ease."

"But I so rarely get to practice my English," Roman complained in that language, and laughed briskly as a cold breeze blew in. He then switched back to his mother tongue.

"The motorcade is on our way - three cars at the front, plus the van, and two trailing about a minute behind with the small pickup truck. We have identified the package, but not Krhistenko. The windows are all tinted, and we have not been able to penetrate them with cameras."

"Do you think the armored van is a decoy?"

"Nyet," Roman said the word sharply. "Krhistenko is a man very concerned with his safety. He will ride in the safest vehicle available."

The American nodded, and Roman got another good look at his face. He seemed incredibly young for such an important individual, and it was hard to believe that the American National Security Agency had many twenty or twenty two year old men on their payroll. He was a specialist of some sort, but Roman was not sure exactly what that meant.

In Basilevsky's opinion, he looked Asian, or maybe half Asian, since his eyes were not nearly so squinty as they should have been (though he had heard some Japanese widened their eyes with surgery). His ID said he was from the U.S., though, so perhaps he came from California or something like that? After the operation, Roman would have to ask. He had been planning a vacation there for a few years now, to go to the beach and drink with the pretty ' California girls' the Beach Boys sang about.

"Then we wait, and continue as planned," the American said, still coolly watching the road as it wound between the woods and disappeared into the mountains. It was not finely paved; their own rough and dumpy trip up part of its length was testament to that fact, but it was a major road, and it was the one their target had taken on his way to the coast.

The forest was particularly thick where they had set up this little roadblock, making it difficult to swerve off the road and go around. They had parked the driver's end of a commercial truck sideways across the road, along with two black, unmarked cars behind it. And those were only the obvious barriers. Their own van was parked a safe distance away.

The object of their endeavor was one Victor Krhistenko. He was the head of Gemini Security Systems, a private military contractor based in Eastern Russia. Apparently, he was wanted in connection with some terrorism-related activities overseas, and the Russian government had decided to bring him to heel. Word was that he was a paranoid old man and an ex-KGB spook, hence why he traveled in an armored van with about a dozen or more bodyguards. A few people had even talked about the old man being obsessed with eastern mysticism, and some crazy cult that could cure his terminal lung cancer.

But Roman didn't put much stock in those rumors.

Most likely, Victor had stepped on some toes that were never meant to be tread upon, and pissed off someone a little too high on the food chain. It happened sometimes. They'd been ordered to take the old man in, so it was possible he'd be put through the ringer but quietly released. PMCs, like arms dealers, could be seriously problematic if not kept on a short leash. Not that any of it was Roman's business (at least it wasn't, until a superior told him to make it his business).

One of the men shouted a warning: vehicle incoming!

The oversized gunmetal grill of a large white car appeared around a bend in the lonely road. Behind it was a second HMMWV, and behind that could be seen the bulk of the armored van. Even from a distance, it looked intimidating. The front was angled, sort of like the face of those American stealth fighters, with a few driving mirrors stuck out like insect antennae. It looked almost more like an APC than an armored car.

The armored motorcade continued down the road towards them, and then the first car started picking up speed. It hit the row of portable directional tire spikes that had been put down beforehand, but the tires themselves remained partly inflated. Running and diving out of the way, the agents near the roadblock moved to get out of the way of the inevitable crash. Other men opened fire on the second car as it, too, plowed over the tire spikes.

The American agent, however, took a few suicidal steps into the middle of the road. Roman didn't even have time to tell for the madman to get out of the way and duck behind the parked truck. What he saw next was something he would never forget. The American 'specialist' they'd been sent to work with took a single step towards the oncoming armored Hummer, and buried his fist – his fist! – into the heavy grill of the car. Where he had taken that step, his foot left a jagged crater in the road, and around his arm, the HMMWV deformed and crumpled as if it had plowed into a tree.

Before that mind numbing feat had even fully registered, the American tore his hand out of the twisted wreckage of the front of the car, and with his left hand, he grabbed the grill and tossed the entire three ton vehicle off the side of the road. Even as the ruined Hummer rolled away like a toy kicked by an angry child, the American repeated the feat with the second speeding vehicle. This time, if anything, he made it look _easier_, and as he tossed the car, one handed, off the road, he said something in … Japanese?

"Bakusai… tenketsu…"

The car came apart in midair, and by the second roll, it had already exploded in flame. Smaller secondary type explosions further ripped it apart as it rolled away from the road, and by the time it hit a tree, it was a mangled, burning and almost unrecognizable mess. There was no way anyone inside had survived.

The careening armored van, the one that had seemed more like an APC, immediately put on the breaks and tried to make a rapid turn rather than get anywhere near the man in the middle of the road. The American stomped his foot, just once, as softly as a man tapping out the beats to a song. The skidding van suddenly found itself falling into a rectangular hole in the road. The breaks screamed and the wheels turned, but there was no stopping its momentum, and a second late it fell sidelong into the pit. Only the rear one third stuck out, tires frantically spinning but with nowhere to go.

The fourth and final car did skid to a halt just before it would have crashed into the immobilized armored van. The doors opened, and several men quickly ducked out and opened fire. The stunned FSB agents only hesitated a moment before returning it. The men stationed on the ridge had already began their grim work, and one of the black fatigued men using the armored door of his car fell away to the side as a sniper rifle round made bloody borscht out of his skull.

Before the fight was over, though, one of the mercenaries opened fire on the American. A dozen rounds splattered against the road where the man had just stood. He had moved fast, amazingly fast, and crouched behind the upended remains of the armored van, safe from any enemy fire.

'So: he's mortal, at least,' Roman silently wondered. 'Or he just doesn't want to be shot. But what I just saw… it wasn't human…'

Still, he added his fire to the hailstorm that had descended on the final car, and in mere moments, the mercenaries were down and their bullet ridden car silent. The American immediately stood back up, took a second to inspect the immobile armored van, and hit it with his palm. When he pulled his hand back, it had left a very clear impression on the metal: a literal handprint.

"Victor Krhistenko!" The American yelled, and punctuated the name by making another palm print out of the armored roof. "Get out of the car!"

Only a few moments later, one of the reinforced van doors opened. Several weapons were tossed visibly into the air: three assault rifles, and several handguns. Two middle aged men in black and tan combat fatigues scrambled out of the door, struggling to keep their hands in the air and get out of the tipped over vehicle at the same time.

Roman immediately directed FSB agents to detain them, and as the officers swarmed the crashed van, an elderly man slowly emerged. He was being escorted out by one of his Gemini Security 'Consultants' who had struck upon the idea that handing over his boss would, maybe, mean he was less likely to be killed in the next few minutes. Victor Krhistenko did not seem pleased by the decision or the situation in general.

The American stood by, silent as a statue, as all four were detained. The driver and a second man were the last to emerge, hands in the air. FSB agents quickly cuffed the men, and started to hustle them back and out of the way. Just moments later, the two trailing cars and the pickup truck rounded the road, and came to an abrupt stop. Armed men flooded out of the vehicles, and the firefight was joined once more.

The inhuman American aside, there was a chance they could have fought their way through the FSB blockade, but that already small chance became slim indeed with the addition of the concealed snipers overlooking their position. One by one they fell, until, sensing the inevitable, the remaining four threw down their weapons and surrendered. The American hadn't even needed to move, instead carefully following the agents who had taken away Krhistenko. By the way he never let the man out of his sight, it was almost like the American was afraid of his quarry getting lost on the way to the extraction point or something.

Roman saw to the last of the mercenaries, and then headed towards where the American and two Federal agents were loading Krhistenko into a black car. The old man was frazzled, but unharmed, and before he disappeared into the backseat of the car, Roman could see that his face was a deadly pale shade of white. Then he was gone, and a burly FSB man sat down and closed the door. A second one took the driver's seat, and started up the car.

Roman gestured to the strange American. "Headed out already?"

The man nodded firmly. "Yes. Sorry, but I have to leave the rest to you."

"That's not a problem, but…" The ambitious FSB agent couldn't help but stare at the plain looking American. Nothing about him gave any impression of being some… some super human monster.

"What was that back there?" Roman asked; he just had to know. "How did you do that?"

The American paused at the threshold of the passenger side car door. After a few seconds, he shrugged.

"It was just a little trick I learned," he answered cryptically, and in a surprisingly soft spoken tone of voice. "Don't look too much into it."

Roman blinked at the strange answer, but nodded. If the Americans had some kind of super strong soldiers or something, and they were willing to send them overseas, then he could hope that mother Russia had a program like that of its own. And if it was 'just a trick' then it was one Hell of a Slight of Hand, that was for damn sure!

"We're supposed to keep this quiet…" Roman said, and motioned behind him. "You're only going to take Krhistenko?"

The American nodded grimly.

When he replied, his voice was devoid of warmth, "Loose the rest of them."

It was an American style euphemism that Roman Basilevsky was familiar enough with. The mercenaries would disappear. It wouldn't be difficult – people like that vanished every day. The NSA agent bowed his head as a parting gesture, and then he, too, slipped into the car. Roman watched as it backed up, turned around, and sped down the road.

Inside the car, Ryouga Hibiki gently massaged his temples with the same hands that had, just minutes before, manhandled armored cars. He tried not to think of the fates of the men who had surrendered back on that lonely road. Killing someone who had given up, who was defenseless, went against everything he believed in. Taking the life of someone in a fight was one thing, but even after everything, it was hard to think about what he had just been party to.

"Hate me, but don't die blaming me," he whispered, closing his eyes and leaning back into the passenger side seat. If circumstances had been different, it was possible that some of those mercenaries could have been working with UNETCO instead of against it. It was even possible that any one of their number could have been asked to join the organization. Instead, they had aligned themselves with enemies of mankind, and traitors to their own people. Above even his vows of honor, he had sworn never to show mercy to the aliens or those who aided them.

Never.

"Where are you taking me?" Victor Krhistenko hissed from the back seat. "I demand you return my cellular phone, and allow me to speak with my lawyer! I demand it!"

Ryouga slowly turned around to glare over his shoulder at the man.

"Let me explain your rights to you," the lost one spoke evenly, but a sneer revealed a single overlarge canine on his upper row of teeth. "We will ask questions and you will answer them. Everything you know, we will know. There is nothing you can say or do to prevent this."

In the back of the black unmarked car, Victor Krhistenko glared right back at his captor.

Before he could say anything, Ryouga continued, "Your nation has abandoned you. There will be no trial. There is no escape. Until you die… the only thing you can do is cooperate."

"You don't know what you're doing," Krhistenko spoke slowly and with undisguised condescension. "The aliens cured my cancer… they know things, they've done things, that people have only dreamed of… They are our future! Our salvation! Why can't you see that?"

Ryouga closed his eyes and turned back around, facing forward. For a few seconds, the only sound was the engine of the car and the intermittent 'wsh-wsh' of the windshield wipers. It was cold outside, but getting warmer and warmer in the car.

"Even if I saw it, Victor Krhistenko… I would reject it. With every fiber of my being, I would reject it."


	65. Justice Machine II

"I don't believe it…" Shampoo whispered, staring at the photograph. Her eyes drew tight, and she had to close them before she embarrassed herself with tears. It was foolish to be so emotional over what had happened, but somehow, all that they had done – the fact that they had brought one of the village elders back alive – made this all the more tragic. Taking a deep breath to steady herself, she gently placed the picture back on the black plastic table.

Sin Ke was dead.

The last Amazon elder had committed suicide in her hospital room. The cause of death had been termed as 'human combustion.' She had self immolated, using the great powers at her disposal to end her own life. According to the time stamp, it had occurred just around the time she and the rest of Juliet Squad had arrived back at Seiran Mountain. Shampoo had never been particularly fond of Sink, but with her gone, all their efforts to at least try and preserve the Amazons as a people seemed so… empty.

"I'm sorry, Shampoo." Ranma placed a comforting hand on her shoulder.

"There's nothing anyone could have done…" Shampoo said softly, looking over the coroner's report. The fire had set off alarms in the room, and triggered the sprinklers, but nothing and no one had been able to put the fire out. Nor could they have. It wasn't just a normal fire, but the combustion of Sink's mental and spiritual energy itself. The heat had been so intense that a good portion of the room and its equipment had melted into slag.

It wasn't how it was supposed to happen.

Shampoo put aside the report, and took stock of several other papers that had been faxed over just a short while ago. A cover sheet indicated that Sink had written several pages worth of information down before the 'accident,' and that all of it had been addressed to 'Shan Pu.' With typical efficiency, it had been passed along as soon as possible. Timestamps indicated when it had been sent, when security had checked it, when it had been copied for recordkeeping, and when it had been printed out.

Ranma stood behind her, purposefully trying to keep from prying into what was a personal letter. He was a curious guy by nature, but in this case, he kept himself near the door – close enough to offer comfort, but far enough not to be hovering. He had led her to one of the unoccupied briefing rooms for a little privacy, and hung around out of a sense of concern. She appreciated him being nearby, even though she knew the affection was purely platonic.

The first paper was a simple suicide note:

_We have failed ourselves._

___What we were is no longer._

_____I leave it to you, Shan Pu, to determine the fate of what remains of the Amazon Nation. For three thousand years, the Oligarchy has endured. Now you alone must decide if this is truly our end as a people. You were right to put your trust in the outsiders and the foreigners and to accept their help. I see that now. You have always been a model Amazon, Shan Pu. I must atone for my crimes and my failure, but before I do, I shall give you your due. _

_____As all our other sisters are gone, I, Sin Ke, hereby pass on the title of Elder. _

_____It is the right of all Elders that now I extend to you. _

_____That woman is still alive. Seek her out if you see fit. _

"That woman?" Shampoo wondered aloud. 'Does she mean great grandmother Khu Lon? Or is it…?'

She caught a glimpse of the next page, and her eyes widened.

'Her!'

She gasped, and noticed Ranma stealing a quick look in her direction.

"Lieutenant," she said, and motioned him to come over and see what she had found. Ranma took a few small steps until he was standing directly behind her chair. He looked down at the papers, and puzzled at them.

"What… what is it?" he asked. "Are those characters or really bad illustrations?"

On the table before them was a sheet of paper with a seemingly incoherent series of scribbles and strange characters. He clearly couldn't make heads of tails of it. Shampoo was momentarily disappointed by that fact, but then she remembered that he was a foreigner (despite his power and skill), so of course he wouldn't be able to translate anything written for Amazon eyes.

"It's a sealing technique using pressure points..." Shampoo had recognized it instantly.

"A sealing technique?" Ranma repeated.

"Yes. The only one that is restricted to members of the Council of Elders," Shampoo explained, and saw that the second and third sheets of papers also had coded instructions written on them. "When an Amazon is exiled from the Tribe, she is branded by this seal. Effectively, it uses the power of the five Elders to permanently cut off a person's ability to use their ki."

"Like Happosai's moxibustion?" Ranma asked, referring to the shiatsu point technique the old master had stolen the scroll for a century ago. That fire-based pressure point had reduced Ranma's strength to that of a baby's. It was one of the low points in his life, anyone who knew him could see as much on his face, and he had been almost insane with relief when it had been removed.

"It is more complex than that technique, but also more powerful."

Shampoo had never seen it done, herself, but she had heard stories about it. The one area of martial arts she likely surpassed Ranma and the others in was shiatsu and the use of pressure points. Sealing or Branding techniques, like the moxibustion, were also familiar to her. They were used to permanently damage or block the flow of _ki_ in the body by obstructing a particular spot. That obstruction then caused a sort of controlled brain damage. Then problem was that none of this was particularly useful against inhuman creatures like aliens. She hadn't even thought about it a long time.

"Even with the moxibustion keeping you weak, you were still fast and you could still use your ki techniques like the Hiryu Shoten Ha," Shampoo reminded him, and then clarified exactly what she had meant before. "This technique, the Five Point Demon Seal, would basically turn you into someone powerless like that strange voodoo boy, Gos.. Gosun…"

"Gosunkugi," Ranma supplied, and frowned. The thought of not only losing his great physical strength, but even his ability to use _ki_… it had to be a horrifying concept. There was a certain amount of conceit that they all shared as martial artists, a natural consequence of being a little more-than-human when it came to their abilities. So the idea of being normal wasn't just a little frightening, for someone like Ranma, it was basically a negation of everything he was. He had no real skills besides martial arts.

Ranma Saotome could have survived the moxibustion, especially now that he knew so many powerful techniques that didn't rely on physical strength, but this seal would effectively kill him. Everything he had ever been would be erased, subsumed, sealed away. Watching his face, Shampoo could see that Ranma was horrified by the very idea. To someone like him, death in battle was infinitely preferable.

"That's… that's horrible…" he said it very quietly, almost as if he was afraid to say more much louder. "Who would do that to someone?"

"As I said," Shampoo repeated herself, turning her attention back to the papers. "The Council used it on Exiles. It was expected that most of those who had been sealed would die in the outside world. It would also prevent anyone from spreading knowledge of Amazon techniques when they were forced out. And…" she trailed off, biting her lip.

"And…?" Ranma prompted. "What?"

"Also…" she hesitated a second, took a deep breath, and just said it, "It was used to… restrain… strong males brought into the Tribe. So they didn't become a threat."

Ranma looked not just horrified, but disgusted, too.

"You mean… You don't mean…" He struggled with just how to ask what he was clearing thinking. "I…?"

"Does it really matter any more?" Shampoo asked pointedly, focusing on the papers so she wouldn't have to see the look on his face. And so he wouldn't see the shame on hers.

Ranma huffed, and crossed his arms defiantly.

"I guess not," he concluded.

"Besides, like most seals and pressure points, it can be reversed. That's the important thing here…" Shampoo held up one of the papers, and dared a smile. It wasn't so difficult a technique, actually, either to perform or reverse. The problem was the sheer volume of _ki_ required.

"Normally," she said, while deciphering some of the peripheral script on the paper. "It takes the power of five Elders to form and reinforce the seal, and the ritual itself takes about five minutes. Once in place, it redirects the energy down the spine and away from the brain."

"Like a surge protector or somethin'?" Ranma guessed, and Shampoo nodded.

"I think so. The person never really loses their ability, they just can't focus it," she elaborated, and then pointed at a different looking seal drawn over a circle. "This is the counterseal, based around a circle and a triangle bypassing the original barrier. It says here that it only requires the power of three Elders instead of five."

"Well, it is an interesting, if very disturbing, technique," Ranma granted her. "But I don't see how it's really that useful right now. I don't think many of our enemies are gonna just stand there and let us brand a seal on 'em…"

Shampoo agreed. It wasn't the sort of technique to use in battle.

"The important thing here is the counterseal," she said, arranging the papers around her on the small table. "Because I can use it on those… Amazons… exiled by the Council."

He raised an eyebrow at that, just then remembering that she had mentioned 'exiles' before. He had probably assumed it was academic, but she had been making a literal reference: more than a few women had been exiled from the village. Some had been punished for criminal acts, others for less _tangible_ offenses. She had been conditioned not to even think of Exiles as Amazons, so saying it, thinking about it, had been difficult.

But necessary.

"According to her note, Sin Ke knew not only that one of these Exiles survived, but where she could be found." Shampoo read off three numbers. "Seven. Zero. Two. An area code?"

Ranma looked a little dubious. "Is this someone important, or…?"

She grinned just enough to show teeth.

"I think so," Shampoo said with some small humor. "I was too young to remember many details, but this one actually fought back when the Elders sealed her. She would probably have been on the Council itself someday, if not for her… problem…"

Ranma tried to imagine someone fighting all five Elders at once. Saffron could have done it, they both knew, but he was about the only one.

"Problem?" he gingerly asked.

"Her name was Perfume…" Shampoo coughed, and blushed a bit. "She and her followers were exiled for being… what's the word? 'deviant?'"

"Deviant?"

"Deviant."

Ranma Saotome let out an exaggerated sigh. "…As if we ever go out looking for normal people…."

* * *

**South Korea**

Ryu Kumon had to admit: he was impressed. He'd heard more than a few rumors, on and off the 'martial artist grapevine,' about Korea's elite special forces units. Some even attributed them with the sort of training regimens that would make him take notice. Not that they repeatedly hardened the bones in their hands to the point where they could put their hand through a tree and tear out chunks of frozen bark, but they were rumored to harden the body through exposure and depravation. He could see some of that great confidence and practiced grace in how they moved.

The only real comparison he'd seen were the men and women of XCOM itself, and they were, after all, the best of the best. In fact, Ryu hadn't even needed to do anything except stand around and oversee the operation. The Republic of Korea's Army Special Warfare Command had been quite willing to cooperate with "Interpol," though from the looks and subtle hints some of the commandos gave him, Ryu suspected that they knew he wasn't from that particular organization. If he had to bet on it, he'd lay odds on them knowing at least something about the alien war kept secret from most of the world.

Which was fine by Ryu.

It meant there was no pretense about the operation. The 707th were ready to do whatever was asked of them. They'd assembled significant resources for the job, and brought them all to Northeastern Gangwon-do Province on very short notice and utmost secrecy. That couldn't have been easy, given how crowded South Korea was, and how prevalent the 'camera culture' was. That last problem, at least, was something Ryu could help them with.

He drummed his fingers against the top of the tall cylinder next to him. It resembled one of those "ionic breeze" fans that he'd seen in stores, with a slightly more complex digital interface on the top. It was UNETCO technology adapted from alien designs. One of the more annoying and dangerous abilities of the aliens was their preference for stealth and their ability to scramble or disrupt electronics. It was the classic UFO effect – the gravity engines would make compasses spin, but it was the stealth field that froze or reset digital clocks, interfered with cameras, phones and computers.

This was a smaller device based on that technology. It didn't do anything to radar, so it wasn't technically _stealthy_, but it did effectively scramble unshielded electronics over a one kilometer radius. So long as it was running, Youtube wouldn't be getting any interesting new videos about the day's overt activities. It helped that the enemy also preferred their solitude, and kept to places removed from normal public activity. Those targets in more conspicuous environs would be taken care of by normal police, and arrested under a variety of charges.

The problem here in Korea was a small alien worshipping cult, of the "Heaven's Gate" variety. There were actually a LOT of alien or UFO related religious movements around the world, and the majority (ironically) had no actual connection to the aliens that were visiting the little blue Planet Earth. This cult, however, was considered compromised and part of the Sirius Conspiracy. According to UNETCO datamining and interrogations, this group assisted the conspiracy financially and by providing recruits.

According to what he'd been briefed on, the cult's favored tactic was to "miraculously heal" people with terminal illnesses or diseases. In actuality, they were abducted by aliens, who then did the actual surgery or healing. The potential cultists were then returned and told that the Space Gods had saved them. It was true in a way… but then the cult took the next step, indoctrinating the faithful and eventually giving them purpose in life: either they aid the conspiracy by opposing the mortal enemies of the 'Space Gods' or they became gullible and eager guinea pigs for alien experimentation.

The former was troublesome, as terrorists always were, but the latter was the most troubling. UNETCO tried to keep a running registry of people with abduction experiences, especially in cases of Sectoid experimentation. It was incomplete, but it was important not just in predicting who the aliens would try and repeat abduct, but also in determining just what sort of experiments were being performed. The most benign were a sort of 'catch and release' program tracking human sociology, behavior, and mating patterns. The less benign experiments…

It was generally best not to dwell too much on _those_.

Intel had indicated that there was, in their own words, "a high incidence of encountering hostile Class-D Abductees and a lesser but still significant incidence of encountering hostile Class-E Abductees." Ryu supposed that was what he was here for. The idea of people taking pride or joy in being abducted and experimented on by aliens didn't make much sense to the Kumon Dojo heir, but he'd seen how devoted monks could be to their own view of the universe.

He dismissed the whole train of thought before it only started frustrating him. Religion really just wasn't something he could wrap his mind around. Fighting, profit, rebuilding the Dojo – these were the tangible methods and goals in his world. Prayers and aliens sure weren't going to help any. In the end, as human beings, all anyone could do was take what he could, and endure what he had to.

Up ahead, smoke rose from the religious compound. Wafts of tear gas roiled from broken windows and open doors. Curls of it wound around the tires of an armored car that had been driven right up to the steps of the main building. The 707th had taken more than a little fire, though most of the enemy forces had been neutralized in the initial moments of the pre-dawn raid.

As expected, the cultists had been well armed, and their sentries had been reasonably alert. But with their electronic security systems fried, and no warning of the attack forthcoming, the Korean SpecForces had made mince meat out of them. With the perimeter guards taken care of, they'd immediately moved to storm the main building. Their orders were to take as many prisoners as possible, but to use unrestrained force in the protection of their own lives. The cultists could be useful sources of information, but they weren't considered critical.

Post-Op, their computers and other personal devices would be confiscated and investigated. There was no doubt that the cult had data-dumping and mass deletion protocols in case of an attack, if only to wipe out their membership rosters and accounting information. It was a sound precaution to take, and if they had actually used it before the raid itself, then Command would be quite unhappy trying to restore the disks and drives. However, with the scrambler active, no amount of cursing and button pressing would do anything to damage the precious and damning data on those computers.

"Fox, Rifle 1. Code Delta. Area secure. Over."

"Rifle 1, Fox. Proceed. Over."

"Recon 1, Rifle 1. Status. Over."

"Rifle 1, Recon 1. Tango approaching back door. No shot. Balcony clear. Over."

"Roger Recon 1. Demo 2, Rifle 1. Frag the door. Rifle 2 clear entry with me. Over."

"Recon 1, Acknowledged."

"Rifle 2, Acknowledged."

"Demo 2, Acknowledged."

"Go!"

"Contact! Got him!"

"Clear."

"Clear."

"Rifle 1, Fox. Status. Over."

"Fox, Rifle 1. One tango down…. Wait. What's that? Rifle 2…!! What the fuck?!"

The sound of static and a man screaming were pretty much the same in every language. Ryu had been following the rapid fire Korean, along with all the other communications being tossed around through the jamming field. The 707th had been given UNETCO issue shielded electronics to replace their own, and this was why. Rifle 1 was part of Team A, and if they were just now assaulting Code Delta…

"_Yare yare_…" Ryu cracked his neck back and forth, loosening it up. Lifting his baklava back up over his face, he quickly identified where – up ahead – his expertise would be finally put to use. He pushed off the ground and moved like a blur.

With a single bound, he alighted on the roof of the compound's main building, built in the semblance of a large western church. Jumping again, an instant later he was behind a man in black fatigues. The Special Forces soldier whirled at the sudden motion, trying to bring his Benelli Super-90 to bear on this new threat. Ryu grabbed the barrel of the shotgun and pivoted, letting it fire harmlessly off to the side.

"Demo 2, right?" he asked, as if the man hadn't just tried to shoot him in a panic.

The man nodded numbly.

"Let me take care of this one," Ryu said, letting go of the shotgun and walking casually towards the door. Inside was dark, and the martial artist was instantly assaulted by the smell of blood.

'That's always a good sign,' he thought with caustic sarcasm. Flicking on the tiny flashlight mounted onto his helmet, the darkness inside parted under the assault of a 12.4 lumen cone of white light. He saw Rifle 1 and 2 almost immediately… or what was left of them anyway.

It looked like someone had taken a cheese grater to the two men and gone completely wild with it. Their fatigues and armor were tattered and shredded, lying on long curls around their flayed bodies. The walls were pock marked by bullet holes, as if the two men had been firing randomly in every direction. From the looks of it, both of them had totally expended the rounds in their silenced MP5SD3 submachine guns. The walls had been painted, disturbingly, with the faces of bug-eyed aliens: Sectoids, and cutesy flying saucers.

Now they were painted with blood.

A low guttural yowl came from deeper in the room, what looked like a kitchen and a sitting area. Ryu took a few cautious steps and paused. It felt the sensation in his mind even as the illusions began to take form. Nightmarish faces seemed to grow out of the walls, clawed hands reaching for him to tear the flesh from his bones. Blood fountained from their eyes as they cursed and screamed.

Ryu raised a disinterested eyebrow.

In front of him, his battle aura flared, coming to his instinctive defense. It flashed again and again, always from his front, cracking to life at different points in midair. Looking down, he could see small tears beginning to appear on his combat vest. A second later, a few small cuts opened up on his arms. He frowned.

"Looks like I've been scratched by a cat," he observed, and then continued walking towards the living area. The barrage became, if anything, more intense. His battle aura was now a blistering shield of crackling mental energy. At his feet, the white tile floor bent and shaved away. The nightmare strewn walls cried paint. A crayon floated eerily through the conflagration, slowly unraveling as the tip sharpened, leaving a long ribbon of pink in its wake. Ryu batted it contemptuously out of the way.

Then he stopped, and lunged with both hands.

The illusion shattered, followed a moment later by the telekinetic barrage. In Ryu's hands were two emancipated girls, twins probably, and probably no older than twelve or thirteen. They had long black hair and round faces, but what was strangest about them were their eyes. The two girls clearly weren't human. Their eyes were surrounded in black, with only vague white pupils. The two glared at their captor with unnervingly emotionless expressions.

Then Ryu clunked their heads together, knocking them out.

"Sorry. I'm not as gentle as my friends." He dropped them, and turned towards the kitchen area. There were another, much younger, set of twins hiding behind the cupboard. He took a few steps towards them, and saw yet another pair of strange young girls. They were like… clones… As one, all four raised their hands and pointed at him.

For a moment, a wave of telekinetic force slammed into his battle aura, causing it to flare bright white. Then the storm subsided, and his aura faded to red, and then into invisibility. The younger girls seemed to have the same basic ability as their elder sisters, but with only a faction of the endurance. Still, it was incredibly high level telekinesis, to say nothing of the (normally) quite convincing and terrifying telepathy.

"Impressive, but not on the same level as a proper Giesteslanze," he said, clapping softly. "Maybe if you had better focus, it would have worked on me."

'What to do with these brats?' Ryu wondered. He'd expected to fight altered humans… but adults, not little kids like this. 'They're dangerous, too. Undoubtedly Class E…'

He kneeled down, pointed his finger at them, and said, "Bang bang bang bang. I've got you, you're dead. Ok?"

The four creepy little girls stared at him with oversized eyes. Then one of them fell to the ground. The others quickly did the same, playing dead. Sighing at how soft he'd become, Ryu Kumon decided to leave the kids where they were for the moment. He'd have to be careful and transport them himself; the two older twins were dangerous enough, but the four little sisters had, between them, more than enough power to mentally flay a normal person alive.

"Now… where are your parents?" he asked, and two of the girls pointed at one of the walls. There was an empty book case there, along with a cork post-it board. Ryu wasn't in the mood to fool around with false doors – he simply kicked the whole wall in. Just as expected, it led to yet another room. The walls were done up in bastardized nursery tones, with prancing cartoon characters on the walls. Except these funny anthropomorphic animals were all personalized by the cult, with eyes colored in black.

Looking around, his flashlight round several more bodies. They were all still and unmoving. Two were alone on small beds, staring upwards. Two others were on the floor, huddled together. Ryu approached the closest of the women and checked for a pulse. A crumpled cup was still wrapped within her loose fingers.

Not surprisingly, there was no pulse. Ryu paused, and gently placed his hand on the woman's swollen abdomen. After a few seconds of feeling nothing move under his palm, he moved on and got a good look at her face. She looked young – much younger than any of the Tendo sisters. Maybe sixteen, maybe younger. He carefully opened one of her eyes, pushing back the eyelid.

Her eyes were blue… and human.

"Dragon. D… Demo 2. Status… over?"

"Stay where you are, Demo 2," Ryu responded, keeping his tone professional and detached. "Do not enter the building."

"Roger Dragon."

He left behind the silent nursery and saw the four little girls still playing dead where he had left them. He entertained the thought that there was still some hope, some future for them. He'd heard that UNETCO had a special facility set up to handle… special children… who were the result of alien experimentation. He watched the four identical children for a few seconds. With their eyes closed, they looked human enough. But... were they?

Ryu sighed.

This mission had ended up being more troublesome than he'd expected.


	66. Justice Machine III

-----

**Socialist****Republic**** of ** **Vietnam**

Ranma grimaced, waving away a particularly aggressive and desperately hungry insect that seemed to be following him around. Vietnam certainly didn't lack for jungles, that was for sure, and it had all the annoying tropical pests he had dreaded. This sort of tropical terrain wasn't one he was familiar with – and he'd trained in pretty much everything else – but, just his luck, he'd been assigned to what had to be the most troublesome mission of them all.

To start with, Vietnam wasn't exactly the most cooperative government in the world when it came to UNETCO. Vietnam (like Laos, Cambodia, and lots of other countries) wasn't a charter member of the organization; it was an 'associate member.' What that meant exactly, Ranma didn't know, but it involved not being able to make much use of the local police or military forces. At best, they looked the other way and weren't totally hostile to UNETCO operations. Which still left him wading up shit creek without a pair of boots.

Well, maybe that wasn't entirely accurate.

Ranma slipped out of the clear (but probably parasite filled) jungle water, and immediately walked right into a giant spider web (which probably had some super poisonous spider in it). He swatted like mad, just to make sure it knew better than to trifle with Ranma Saotome, Master of Indiscriminate Grappling. Big nasty jungle spiders, oh, Akane would just love hearing about _this_ fun filled mission!

Luckily he was in another UNETCO stealth suit, just like before, and thus insulated from the local hostile wildlife by several layers of high tech fibers... and stuff. As long as it worked, he didn't really care exactly what was in it, anyway. He'd watched those specials on TV, with the catfish that swam up into unmentionable areas, and flies that laid eggs in your skin and shit.

It wasn't as if the aliens had a monopoly on horrible creatures.

The suit was necessary mission gear, and not just because he wasn't here to make nice with the wildlife, or to generously donate a pint of blood to the local ecosystem. Despite the unfamiliar terrain, he kept an eye on his GPS "minimap" overlay, and continued onward towards his target. There probably weren't any traps scattered around, but Ranma wasn't going to take the chance. He easily bypassed any potential problems by taking to the trees.

Nimbly leaping from branch to trunk to canopy he crept along, and in only a few minutes, he saw the reason why he was out in the middle of nowhere. Up ahead was Lake #8. Ranma crossed his fingers and hoped. Taking out a small but otherwise perfectly normal compass, he watched the needle.

It spun.

'Thank you, God, Jesus, Kami and Buddha!' he thought with true conviction. 'Finally!'

He flexed his fingers, menacingly popping the knuckles of his hands. Eight lakes. Eight. He had been skipping around this forsaken jungle for the better part of the day. Ranma supposed he should have been happy that the target was at Lake #8 instead of #11, but couldn't it have been at #1 or #2?

Taking a careful look around, Ranma calmed himself, concentrated, and slipped into the stealth form of the Umisenken. He moved with extra caution, mindful that, even when hidden from normal perception, he could make his presence obvious by disturbing the foliage. The technique made him invisible, not intangible, after all. His patience and skill were soon rewarded.

A vaguely humanoid shape emerged from behind a cluster of bushes. It was purple and slick with water or perspiration (or mud). To some poor lost villager, it would have probably been identified as a swamp monster, or a demon or a fish-man or some other local superstition. Even though he hadn't encountered one in quite some time, Ranma knew exactly what it was: a Floater.

And at the moment, it was cradling something white in its left hand. It didn't look like a weapon. In fact, the Floater had its plasma pistol hanging behind it in a black and green holster. Ranma peered at the creature, trying to fathom what sort of high tech alien device it was so interested in… and the Floater picked one of the eggs out of its hand and plucked it into its toothy mouth.

Ranma felt a sweat drop roll down the side of his head.

The Floater seemed to really like the taste of the egg is had purloined from some animal's nest, as it quickly devoured another one. It even licked its fingertips. This was something Ranma knew he just had to take note of in his mission report when he got back to base. Note to Xeno-studies: Floaters like crocodile eggs. Or whatever they were. The hungry alien didn't even notice when Ranma approached fit from behind.

"Goshin Ryu Sei Fu," Ranma whispered, and the alien's vision instantly turned pitch black. The Self-Protection Falling Star Cloth was a choking/binding technique, but if necessary, it could be used lethally. For comparative purposes, it took about 67 pounds of pressure to choke a human. Ranma exerted, in that instant, 2,645 pounds of pressure along the wire edge of the Star Cloth by wrapping and then tightening it across the neck, like a garrote.

The hungry Floater was instantly beheaded.

Ranma danced around the spray of blood, not getting even a drop on him, even as he picked the alien's pistol right out of its holster. He didn't intend to start any fire fights on this mission, but at the same time, a second handgun couldn't hurt. He faded from view a second time, heading towards the dot that had been illuminated on his HUD minimap by the suit's motion sensor (mounted on his shoulder, in lieu of putting too much bulk on his laser pistol).

It was another Floater, this one more alert than his comrade had been. He died before he even realized the sort of danger he was in. There was a third perimeter guard, too, this one hanging out by the water. A chewed on fish nearby indicated that all the Floaters here were probably snacking on the local wildlife.

Intel had learned from the human conspirators and the records on the Procyon that an alien ship had landed there and participated in transporting several shipments of Venom to Southeast Asia. That had been on the 29th of November, and they were still hanging around. Command was quite certain that there wasn't an alien base in Vietnam or Laos, which meant the culprit was a 'free range' or 'skipper' UFO. These classically kept low to the ground, under the radar, and stopped at bodies of water. It was work well suited to Floaters, since they could survive on Earth (and on unprocessed Earth foodstuffs) pretty much indefinitely.

Intel had made the conclusion (at least partially based on the size of the landing pad on the Procyon) that they were looking for a medium scout. That class of UFO could have as many as nine crew members, but experience with 'skippers' had indicated that the crew on this ship would only be about four or five, since they had to live off the land and their limited supplies. He'd already killed three.

That left the navigator (who would probably always remain in the ship) and one more soldier. Ranma finished checking around the small lake, and when he was sure there weren't any more of the creatures _floating_ around (and after he smirked at his clever use of the verbal pun), he stripped the aliens for any useful items, and tossed them into the water. The ecosystem would handle the rest when it came to corpse removal. The metal lower torsos would remain, but it was doubtful anyone would find them, and they were non-toxic as an environmental hazard.

Jumping into the water, the UFO itself wasn't terribly hard to find. The lake wasn't huge (none of the ones he had visited really were), and the Medium Scout wasn't that small. It was a giant metal Frisbee one story tall, after all. The real trick was in getting _inside_ while it was still underwater. The later alien ships were all compartmentalized, with airlocks of some sort of another, but the Medium Scout was too small for that. Opening the door would flood the whole chamber, if it wasn't already full of lake water.

Ranma drifted down towards the sunken face of the ship, looking for the almost seamless rectangular section of the hull that functioned as the door. It worked underwater just as it had worked back when he and Ryouga had taken the Sectoid Abductor vessel, back when this business had began. Pushing, holding, and releasing, he felt no rush of water drawing him into the ship. It really had been kept flooded.

The two Floaters inside had to have been surprised and they lunged for him.

He almost pitied them. Plasma weapons didn't work underwater (they would only superheat the water around the person firing it), so with few other options, the aliens had decided to just try and deal with him hand to hand. Against most any human, underwater, it would've been a one sided fight totally in their favor.

Ranma seized the wrist of the one closest to him even as it reached out, clawed hands eager to seize the foolish human intruder. Underwater combat was actually quite similar to midair combat, the specialty of Saotome Style Anything Goes Martial Arts. It was also (he supposed) quite like zero gravity combat. The idea was to control the contact points between yourself and the enemy, and to manipulate the distribution of forces.

If you strike someone in midair, neither you nor your target are braced against anything. The force drives you apart, and is imparted to the target inefficiently. Unless you had significant momentum already carrying you into your target, the strike would have a lot of wasted potential energy. The answer: if neither you nor your opponent had bracing or significant momentum, the way to deliver a powerful blow was to grab a part of the opponent, and then strike.

The strike itself would serve not only to impart energy and cause damage, but also to throw off the enemy's balance and manipulate their spatial position relative to yourself. Mastery of non-grounded martial arts required an understanding of the principles of motion, counter motion, rotation and counter rotation. The goal was contact to strike to motion – all leading into a chain of attacks capable of defeating even a stronger opponent.

Ranma pulled the Floater in, using the contact point about the alien's wrist. Through years of practice, he knew without thinking deeply about it exactly where their shared center of gravity was. Ranma exploited that point in space and introduced his elbow to the alien's throat. It made a breathless underwater gasp. Ranma switched hands holding the alien's wrist, from right to left, pulling the Floater closer even as he struck with an open palm.

Floaters were tough, especially because most of their vital organs were encased in that pesky metal bulb that made up the mid to lower torso. The only vital organ left exposed was the brain, which remained in place, shielded only by a thin later of bone. Ranma's strikes cracked through that bone like a rock breaking open an oyster. In two or three seconds, it was over. The Floater's head lolled back at an odd angle, trailing a growing cloud of red.

Ranma kicked off the body, using it to propel him towards the last of the creatures. This Floater was more than a little wary, having just seen the human crack open the skull of its comrade. Ranma reached for it – an obvious and slow move. The alien took the bait and tried to grab him by the exposed limb. The moment it did, however, Ranma twisted his arm, sending his body in the opposite direction, and his enemy in the direction of the original motion.

A more experienced martial artist, even one that didn't prefer to fight in the air (Ryouga and Kuno came immediately to Ranma's mind, though Mousse was quite competent on the wing, so to speak), would have been able to meet the countermotion, and use it. The Floater, due to surprise or inexperience, tried to rake at Ranma's face, hoping to remove his helmet and deprive him of air.

But Ranma knew the limits of the alien's reach, and the twist had kept them just that far apart. He grabbed the arm with his free hand, pulled out his arms, and twisted them together. This locked each of the Floater's arms between Ranma's own, like a stick caught in a vice. Ranma had control of the contact points and the advantage of positioning. He no longer needed a solid surface. With upper body strength alone, he brought his fists up to his face, snapping the alien's forearms like match sticks.

With both arms broken, the alien drew back, but Ranma wouldn't let it end just there. Grabbing the Floater's broken left arm, he pulled back his right fist and extended his index and middle finger. He hadn't been able to use this against the other alien because it left him exposed, but this one couldn't counter attack. Ranma thrust his hand forward and pulled the alien towards him. With an inaudible underwater splatter, he buried his fingers into the creature's left eye, breaking through a paper thin layer of bone, and into the brain.

'Ugh!' Ranma drew back his hand and wiped it off on his stealth suit. Still, killing was killing, wasn't it, no matter the method?

Swimming over to the still active control panel, he got a good look at what he had to work with. He was usually happy to leave the technical stuff to others, but he'd been briefed on what to do, and repeatedly drilled on it. There hadn't been time to really learn the alien language, but luckily enough; the mind-interface was built to work with extremely limited instruction.

WORK

Nothing dramatic happened, but then again, it was already up and running.

AIR

This time, the telepathic command instantly triggered a positive response in the ship. The water level began to drop immediately, and in only four or five seconds there was little more than a centimeter of liquid on the floor. Ranma could see that the entire floor had turned semi-porous, with millions or maybe billions of tiny holes. Then the last of the water was gone, and the holes vanished into the seamless alien alloy floor.

STATUS

The screen flickered, turning into a display of the ship, its status, and its functions. Ranma thought-triggered the engines, ignoring most of the lines of alien gibberish that scrolled up and down the projected holo-screen. He maneuvered easily enough from display to display simply by knowing what he wanted.

ACTIVATE

The engines took only a second to charge up to full power, from their previously idle state. Behind him, in the center of the scout ship, a bubble of alien metal flowed and parted, merging back into the ceiling and floor. It revealed a pulsing orange structure reminiscent of a piston rhythmically going up and down. That rhythm was the heartbeat of the ship, and that plain orange piston the Elerium-115 Annihilation Reactor.

Leaving the displays relating to the engines was a little trickier than getting to them, since the only thing Ranma knew how to do was backtrack to where he started. Any advanced switching between the displays was still out of his league. After a minute or two, he was ready to set a destination. This would have been the hardest part, picking a set of four dimensional coordinates (three for space and one for time), except that he had just been told to memorize what to put in and not work it out on the fly. That was just fine with Ranma. It was what those eggheads back at the base were for, after all.

"Now…" he wondered aloud, scratching his chin. "What… were those coordinates again…?"

He thought for a few seconds and laughed at his own foolishness. He'd almost forgotten that he's prepared a backup, for just this sort of situation! Opening a pocket by his waist, he whipped out a small piece of paper in a plastic doggy bag.

A thoroughly soaked and non-waterproof doggy bag.

"Aw, man…"

* * *

**Tokyo**

The light snowfall seemed suspended in the air, forced downward by gravity and upward by the wind billowing up from below. It was the crown of Tokyo: a magnificent cluster of zen gardens and immaculately arranged cherry trees, all growing atop the roof of one of the city's tallest sky scrapers. Kuno held his sword before him and in a blindingly fast flash of movement, the stillness of the air resounded with the echo of three gunshots being deflected.

He scoffed at the feeble attempt. "It shall take more than that, fiend, to avert the vengeance of heaven!"

A pair of _zori_ straw sandals made faint crunching sounds against the freshly fallen snow. Kuno faced this new opponent with a measure of genuine respect. He had seen this one man's skill before; when he had dispatched the federal agents Kuno had stormed the building alongside. He was a rugged looking but clean shaven man, perhaps in his early thirties, with an exceptionally long samurai topknot. His traditional hakama and loose, easy fitting and undecorated Nagajūban mirrored Kuno's own taste in dueling attire.

The two master swordsmen stood face to face, several meters apart.

"Kuno Tatewaki," he introduced himself. "Age: 19. Of the Kashima Shinden Jikishinkage-ryū. Founder of the Hououkendo- ryū. The Blue Thunder of Justice."

The older man inclined his head in greeting and respect.

"Tsukahara Ushijima Nishizou," he said in a low voice. "Shindo Munen Ryu Kenjutsu. If you wish Masaharu-sama's life, then you must first defeat me."

Safe behind his bodyguard, the evil Miyamoto Masaharu snickered in a suitable villainous 'kukuku' fashion. The sound of an approaching escape helicopter had emboldened him, and he was now confident of making his escape not just from the city, but from Japan itself. He held the _tanto_ tightly against his hostage's throat; she was helpless to escape. Her only hope was that Kuno could defeat the evil businessman's bodyguard and rescue her before it was too late.

"I think I will take the woman with me, as a momento to remember this country by," Masaharu added, chuckling at the prospect.

"Iiiieeee!" The red haired girl screamed. "Kuno-sama, please save me!"

"Do not worry, pig-tailed girl!" Kuno cried, dramatic lightning playing off his perfect hair and….

"Oi! Kuno."

"Saotome," Kuno grumbled, looking at the pigtailed boy across the bar counter. "Why do you interrupt my narration? Did not you, too, wish to know of my exploits of the last two days?" 

"Yeah, Ranma," Ryouga leaned across the table with an uncharacteristically wide grin. "Don't you want to know what happens to the pigtailed girl?"

Next to the lost boy, Ryu was too busy trying to hold back his laughter to contribute to the conversation. Sitting between Ranma and the autobiographical kendoist, even Ukyou seemed to be having a hard time reigning in the giggles. On Ranma's left, Konatsu seemed to finally realize something important.

"But… but… what were you doing there, Saotome-taichou…?" Konatsu grinned like a cat. "Shouldn't you have been in Vietnam around this time?"

Ranma slowly turned his head to stare at the ninja-boy with half lidded eyes.

"What are you talking about?" Kuno asked, now totally confused. "Saotome wasn't there at all!"

And then they broke into laughter again.

"Damnit, Kuno," Ranma tried to address his old enemy over the dim of guffaws and giggles. "Don't go saying the pigtailed girl was there if she wasn't. Was **any** part of your story true?"

Kuno paused, and relented. "I may have embellished the minor details just a little… but it _was_ snowing, and Masaharu did try and flee. Saotome, all of the finest chronicles have an element of fiction to them. You must understand this well, for your tale was quite fanciful…"

"It was the honest truth!!" Ranma yelled and Kuno drew back, making warding gestures with his fingers.

"So!" Ryu leaned over onto the counter, tears rolling down his cheeks. "Does this pigtailed girl put out?"

Ukyou started pounding the table, covering her mouth with her hand as she laughed.

"A gentleman does not kiss and tell, my friend," Kuno replied with an all-too confident grin. "But suffice to say, she was quite appreciative of the rescue…"

"What did I just say?!" Ranma yelled.

"A toast!" Ryu declared, raising his ceramic _choko_ cup and the flask of sake itself. "To the pigtailed girl!"

"To the pigtailed girl!" Ukyou seconded, holding out her cup so Ryu could reach over and fill it up. The sake was cold, and off season, but no one had complained (except Kuno, but he didn't count).

"Yes, to this exotic pigtailed girl!" Konatsu added.

Cups filled, they all drank, even Ranma and Kuno, who were in better spirits than anyone would have suspected. Despite all the joking about his curse, Ranma was still just failing to hold back a smile of his own. He shook his head, and laughed a little. The last three, or three and a half, days had been a real grind. They hadn't been off duty or between missions in half a week!

But it had been more than worth it.

The bastards responsible for the attack on the village had been tracked down and captured by the Chinese authorities. The men were both Chinese, but only one was a national, the other was foreign born. From the wind and dispersal pattern at the attack site and a bunch of other technical mumbo jumbo Ranma didn't understand but pretended he did, Intel had identified the spot in the hills near Jyusenkyou where the attack had originated. Apparently, the two men had had a few drinks, at least three of which had rolled away and never been retrieved. Their DNA and fingerprints were still on the cans.

The last two days had been devoted to hunting down and eradicating every trace of the so called 'Cult of Sirius' and any of its affiliates or allies. As stinging as it had been to lose that alien Battleship and to have an Avenger knocked out of service, the human terrorist threat was far more serious. While the men and women of Juliet and India Squads had done their part to free up manpower, and to further the overall investigation of the conspiracy, UNETCO had come down on the Cult like ten tons of bricks. Even the rich snobs bankrolling Sirius operations, and the corporations profiting from them, had not escaped XCOM Justice. The organization was ruthless to the point of zealotry in its defense of Earth, and Ranma almost felt bad for the bastards who sided with the enemies of humanity. Of course, all he had to do was remember the Procyon and the Amazon Village for that magnanimity to disappear. Those bastards had used innocent Filipino men and women as test subjects for their poison. Just days later, flush with success, they'd smuggled samples of the Venom by boat to Shantou, and out of Vietnam using private aircraft and corrupt officials. The poison meant for Hong Kong had been seized by UNETCO biohazard-trained operatives on small speed boats loaded with rockets. 

Just an hour or two later, Ukyou and another agent found a ship and a crop duster in Kuala Lumpur, both of which had been modified to deliver the chemical weapon. The cultists had planned a reign of terror beyond even Singapore and Hong Kong, striking Bangkok, Taipei, San Francisco, Shanghai, Seoul and Tokyo. Luckily, most of those cities had been saved when they had taken the Procyon. They'd been just too late to prevent the tragedy at Jyusenkyou, but they'd managed to save untold civilian lives elsewhere.

Of course, no one would know about it.

UNETCO had covered the whole thing up. There wasn't so much as a peep about what had happened on the news anywhere. There were no pictures, no photographic evidence, and no frantic phone calls to tip off the media. Those terrorists who didn't meet justice in the field would never tell their story, at least not until the war with the aliens was over, and Earth was free to resume its standard rounds of petty squabbling. Ranma doubted those two men from 'Zhang's Fireworks Company' would ever get that chance, once the Chinese government was done with them.

So they had cause to celebrate not just a well earned break from work, but their own accomplishments. Looking down the bar counter in Seiran Mountain's cafeteria, Ranma saw his comrades – his friends – laughing and joking. It was just too bad that Akane wasn't there, too, but then there was also the secret fear he had that if she were around, someone's old habits would kick in and somehow the get together would turn into a brawl.

He really didn't want that, but at the same time he missed her. She'd be rotated off active duty tomorrow, and he silently wondered just how he could tell her how he felt, without… well, actually babbling about it in some lame way. Her signing up for duty (and being _accepted_ no less) still aggravated him and filled him with worry, but at the same time, he was pretty proud of the tomboy, too. It was all too damn confusing!

That was a problem for tomorrow, though. For now, he could relax and not worry about a damn thing. He couldn't even remember the last time so many of his friends had been together and not fighting or feuding. Maybe it had never even happened before! Even Kuno was in high enough spirits to laugh at himself; quite the accomplishment in and of itself.

Then the swordsman seemed to realize something. 

"I had been meaning to ask, my friends, where are our Chinese compatriots? Did they not wish to share drink with us?" he asked, looking around.

Ryouga grumbled something, but it was Ranma who answered the question.

"They're working on something important," the young Special Lieutenant said with a knowing smile.

"Oh?" Kuno asked, the inflection in his voice hinting at just what he thought that 'something important' to be.

"Hey!" Ukyou popped up behind the bar, holding up another bottle. "Shōchū! Let's have another toast!"

"Yeah!" Ryu cheered.

Still, Ranma knew he was the one she was waiting to hear approval from. "Alright! I don't think I've had that one before."

"I know this brand; you'll like it!" Ukyou took a handful of ice out of the bar freezer, and dropped two cubes in each of their cups. She then popped the top on the Shōchū bottle, and began to pour. The fact that she'd run a restaurant and probably poured many drinks before became immediately apparent. After that first drink or two, she'd slipped easily back into old habits, including a few from her one-of-the-boys femininity-renounced days.

"I'm gonna drink all you guys under the table tonight!" she proclaimed, Osaka accent becoming just a bit more pronounced. She raised her glass. "To justice for bad guys, and beatin' 'em all down!"

The guys cheered, and the six martial artists drank and reminisced.

* * *

Mousse couldn't believe what he'd just heard.

"You can't be serious…" he said slowly, testing the waters, sure that Shampoo was just pulling his chain (of which he had many).

Shampoo shook her head. "I have never been more serious in my life, Mu Tzu."

They were alone in her room. Under different conditions, the very thought of that would have fogged over Mousse's goggles and scrambled the logical parts of his brain. In fact, that still threatened to happen, but he was far more jaded after the events of Jusendo. He had literally passed up the chance to make her love him, he had given her freedom and independence, and she hadn't given him even the time of day. He could understand not getting even a word of appreciation or thanks, but to have her continue to treat him like he was some kind of leper or pariah…

Even after joining UNETCO, she hadn't actually been particularly friendly with him. He had tried to just establish some sort of cordial respect between them, they had known each other practically all their lives, and they were the only two Amazons in the entire organization. Shampoo could be so kind, so strong, so wonderful… but she tended to be a bitch. He was painful to admit that, because he did love her, but facts were still facts, no matter how distasteful.

So he'd come to her quarters, expecting more to be chewed out than anything. Standing at her door, the alternative thought had occurred to him that maybe she needed to emotionally unburden herself, and that she needed a shoulder to cry on. He would have liked to be that sort of a man; someone she could confide in and show weakness to, but he also knew that really wasn't Shampoo's way. She was an Amazon.

And she had just reminded him that he was one, too.

"There had never been a male Elder," he replied, weighing his words carefully. "There can never be one."

"I would understand if you don't want to do this," she said, hugging her sides. "But I don't think I can do this alone. The Amazon Way… it has to change to survive in this era… I need you, Mu Tzu. I need your help to rebuild the Amazon Tribe."

He frowned a bit, considering what she could mean. The Amazons were all gone.

"The Exiles?" he asked, and the frown deepened.

"You know where some of them are," Shampoo said, and Mousse pretended to look away at one of the potted plants in the room: a small snake plant.

"I know you do," she pressed him. "They helped you, didn't they? When you ran away? Now you can return the favor."

At that, Mousse stared at her intensely. "You don't mean…?"

Shampoo grinned, and gestured towards the table, and the area next to her computer. She opened up a black folder there, revealing Sin Ke's papers. Mousse took a few steps over, and leaned down to get a better look.

"The Council had always been an odd number," Shampoo reminded him. "Either three, as in the distant past, or five. There is someone I would like to find."

"A third Elder…?" Mousse straightened, and smirked. "I can guess who that is. Interesting! You know where she is?"

"I do." Shampoo nodded. "The United States."


	67. Comrades I

Note:  
I've been away for a while now doing doctorate work (the cause of pretty much all my major delays), but I've got some more time over the next few weeks, so I'd like to get a bunch of TRTC written. I'm also dabbling some more in fic related art again, but more on that later (I'll put em up on DevArt when things are ready - probably when I upload the last part of this chapter). A bit of warning: there won't be huge blocks of action for a while as a few story arcs and sub plots get explored. But when the time for action comes, I expect most people will be able to guess roughly what it will involve after reading this chapter...

* * *

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. The UNETCO timetable moves ever forward, but a new complication has arisen as the alien forces in the Far East surge out in unexpected numbers and with surprising fury. After the grueling Operation Winter Triangle, and the resulting assault on the Sirius Conspiracy, the two squads take a few moments of rest between missions. Threats still loom large on the horizon, as Cologne and the other corrupted martial artists head to their new home.

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia**

Chapter XXIII  
_Comrades_

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

The aliens watched, perplexed, as Cologne's tea settled into just the right temperature short of boiling; heated by a small orange flame in the palm of her hand. Working the controls of the medium scout, one of the little gray creatures kept peeking over its shoulder, probably afraid the hot liquid would somehow end up splashing it. Another stared openly, large black eyes unblinking as it watched her practiced motions. A third watched both her and her companions, and despite being armed with a plasma weapon capable of disintegrating the torso of even the most practiced martial arts master, it seemed jittery in their presence. 

Cologne smiled amiably at both the anxious alien and his curious friend.

With the tea just ready, she lifted the pot out of her palm and placed it on the floor of the little flying saucer that had been sent to retrieve them. She then neatly unfolded four jade colored napkins and refolded them into a different, rectangular, shape to serve as coasters. Inhaling the sweet spreading scent wafting out from the open top of the kettle, she inclined her head to each of her guests in turn, before pouring the liquid into each of their respective ceramic vessels.

Tofu looked down at the cup near where he sat, cross legged.

"Three hundred and fifty eight degrees Kelvin; twelve thousand parts per million…Your proportioning is excellent as always," he observed dryly, and reached for the ceramic cup. "One last indulgence, then."

"Tea is about more than proportions, Doctor."

WARNING – APPROACHING INTERCEPT

EVASIVE MODE ENGAGED

"But of course. Our perceptions are colored by experience as well…" Tofu cracked a rare smile, the hollows around his dead eyes scrunching up. Unlike herself, he had embraced the notion of surrendering the transient flesh to accelerated decay. With every passing day, he became more and more the model of a true Trenchard: a human that was no longer human, in body or mind. In time, he would be _given_ a titian mantle, and become an Ethereal in all but genetics and name. Already, there was little of his original good looks left to enjoy. His cheeks were beginning to draw back and down, forcing his face into a typical Ethereal scowl, and as his skin grew shallower, the area around his eyes became more skull like. The bangs of hair were gone at the front, leaving only a jagged ridgeline of hair that seemed to recede more every day.

The man sitting to Tofu's right reached for his cup, gently cradling it in his gloved hands. "This is real _Da Hong Pao_, you say?"

Cologne had not seen Koichi Ayabe for some time; the first time, of course, had been when she and Tofu "interviewed" him on his way home from work. The Cult of Sirius had held him for a time, sedated of course, until the aliens landed and did their work. They had wanted to keep him, too, but Cologne had requested his help in securing another potential applicant. Hollow Eyes, her benefactor, had agreed. That had been the last time she had seen Ayabe, and he was little changed from then.

The middle aged man still wore a crisp, clean black business suit and a tie that one of his children had probably gotten him for Father's Day. He wore a hat over his now bald head, and his eyes had taken on a shade of very pale blue-violet, like lightning frozen in time. A small black lacquer case rested on the floor next to him. From that last get together they had had, Cologne recognized it as where he kept his 'little surprise.' It had been a good thing that when she and Tofu first ran into him he had left it at home.

"The real thing, Ayabe-san," she replied, using Japanese for what she expected to be one of the last few times. Soon they would all be expected to converse entirely in direct psionics, or, alternatively, through The Mind. Snakemen and Floaters used vocalizations as their primary means of communication, and they were thought less of because of it. Cologne did not intend for herself, for the Trenchards, to be in the same class as those fodder. Besides, the First would expect it of her when they met.

"It smells wonderful, as expected." He paused before drinking, asking, "But how did you get any? _Da Hong Pao_ is so rare, not to mention expensive…"

"How do you suppose she got it?" Tofu asked facetiously.

"Stole it?" Ayabe guessed.

"Mmm. It was in Shanghai after we parted ways."

"It was then, huh?"

"Excuse me, gentlemen. I did not steal it," Cologne interrupted the two men. "I was given it."

"You mind controlled him," Tofu replied, taking a quick sip from his cup before adding. "The act of giving implies altruism. However… giving someone an irresistible compunction to hand over four hundred and fifty thousand Yuan in tea is not altruistic in any way."

Cologne shrugged as Ayabe raised an eyebrow and looked over her shoulder at the luggage – the actual luggage – she had demanded to bring along. She smiled at the attention, and the memory of how the aliens had boggled at her as she carried it aboard. It really had been a priceless moment, to see confusion on a Sectoid's normally immobile and emotionless face. Still, it wasn't like it was all clothes in there. She'd brought along some very important artifacts and documents as well.

The last member of their group sat in silence to Cologne's left. The girl stared mutely at the cup before her with half lidded eyes, as if she was on the edge of falling asleep. Like Cologne, she did not appear to be undergoing the Trenchard process whereby the physical body degenerated… however, her case was rather unique. Cologne had to constantly heal herself (or get Tofu to do it) to make the necessary changes to her body on the cellular level while also maintaining her appearance. This girl did not. Because of the two curses placed upon her, one by accident and the other by design, she would probably never resemble a true Trenchard.

"Why don't you drink your tea…" Cologne said, facing the young woman. It was not a question. "It's very good… Rouge…"

"Oh… tea?" Rouge blinked a few times, and reached a hand up to massage her temples. Her father had been Indian, her mother Chinese, but her complexion was very light. She was technically from Shanghai (the reason they had gone to that city in the first place), but both her parents had passed away several years ago and her unusual ability was unknown to all but a select few… so her disappearance would not raise questions. After her "interview" with the other three Trenchards, they had decided that it was best if she did away with her normally exotic preferences in clothes and instead tried to blend in with something casual and modern. Wearing a plain sundress and shoes, she had ended up looking surprisingly mundane.

Blinking large brown eyes, she focused on the cup in front of her, as if realizing it for the first time. "Oh! I'm sorry, Miss Cologne… I…"

She lowered her hand and Cologne could see the seal on her forehead faintly begin to glow… but then it was gone. Rouge smiled back and drank the tea, though Cologne doubted she had enough experience with the beverage to really understand how or why it was so rare and expensive. The girl was actually quite clueless for the most part, but she had great power within her, power Cologne could control and unleash as desired.

The former Matriarch of the Chinese Amazons smiled smugly and took a drink from her cup, savoring the complex flavor of the tea. In her mind, she could hear/see/perceive what was happening outside the ship. They were flying low, trying to avoid detection, while a large scout ran interference at a higher altitude. The large scout was much better armed and armored than their own ship, but it was notorious for being a prime target for XCOM interception. Medium scouts were weaker and slower, but their same compact size made them effectively much stealthier. Already, XCOM had sortied a ship of their own that was now chasing down the offensive large scout on its "UFO Retaliation/Investigation" mission.

Very soon they would be in North Korean airspace, and then XCOM would be far less likely to detect them. Until then, all she and her new comrades could do was sit, wait, and trust in the competence of the ship's navigator and the technology of the UFO itself. If things went to plan then they would survive the trip or at least (hopefully) survive a crash landing. If things did not go well, then it was quite likely they would all be vaporized by a wave of plasma and anti-matter fired sixty miles away. There was absolutely nothing they could do about it.

So they sat quietly and drank tea.

Nearly at the border, it happened. The stealth system scattered virtually all attempts at radar lock-on, but for just a ghost of a moment, they appeared somewhere, in some way, on someone's screen. The alien pilot thought-projected the fact with emotionless acceptance. It was unknown whether their radar silhouette appeared to be that of a true unknown contact, a formal UFO, or if they showed up as small as a bird. Anything suspicious would end up in XCOM's data processing computers, and if it seemed like a true UFO contact, they would be mind scanned from a distance. If that happened, their only hope was in their speed, and the close proximity of the alien base.

No killing lance of sun fire came.

The large scout, as expected, had been shot down by one of the scrambled XCOM craft, but their craft had gotten through. This last drink of tea, possibly the world's finest, would not be their last. She had brought more, of several varieties, but none as fine as that they had just shared. Cologne hoped to enjoy them for some time yet – perhaps once a year for a hundred years or so? At least until she could convince the Mind to let her grow some in the gardens on Mars.

"Well… looks like we made it," Ayabe said, and lazily sighed as he eased up and into a standing position. Holding out his hand, he helped Rouge onto her feet as well.

"I'll admit, I have been looking forward to this: to leaving." Doctor Tofu stood and cracked his neck back and forth. "And to meeting the First. We are both doctors, after all."

"I'm sure you two will get into all kinds of trouble…" Cologne was the last to stand up, and as she did, the wall behind her began to morph revealing the UFO's door. The aliens began to head towards it, and the light beyond, while the four former humans exchanged looks. They were here; it was time.

"Just a second. I want to remind all of you…" Cologne said, before they followed in the aliens' footsteps. "Our little family isn't complete yet, but it will be… very soon, _they'll_ come to us. When that happens, I want them alive. They don't have to be very alive, but there has to be enough to work with. Understood?"

"Ranma…" Rouge's eyes narrowed. "I remember him… he helped me… somehow…"

" Cologne," Ayabe replied and smirked, tightening the leather glove on his right hand. "What makes you think they'll run into us when they attack this base? …Fate? Luck?"

"Call it inevitable." Cologne's smile widened enough to show teeth. "Call it… destiny. Ours and theirs."

"Let's go," Tofu said, not making any promises one way or the other. He walked into the light beyond the alien ship, and they followed.

* * *

Zraz suppressed an angry snarl as he scratched the welts on his thin human skin. He had never itched before; it wasn't a sensation his species normally exhibited. The problem wasn't the body itself, but all the stupid insect life on this wild, wet world. Sometimes it seemed like half the tiny creatures existed solely to irritate those larger than themselves. In the short time he had been human, Zraz had decided that he hated them infinitely more than the humans themselves or anything else he could think of. If he ever got back into space or back to Mars, he promised himself he would take a bath in the comforting vacuum, naked of everything save a gas mask. 

Of course, he'd do it in his original body, not this human one.

Finishing the bowl of vegetable meal he had been given, something made out of little bits of some kind of grain, Zraz felt his stomach rumble. It was hungry for more. Being hungry was yet another feeling he had never before experienced. That one bowl would have to do, though. Luckily, before he'd undergone the actual transformation, he had 'uploaded' as much information about the local human culture and language as possible, both from the Mind itself, and from the human they had subdued near the cursed springs.

He'd hoped to have been picked up by now by either his fellow aliens or by some of the humans in their thrall. The first approach had proven impossible after Zraz had found out that his connection to the Mind wasn't working while in human form. This was contrary to the Sectiods who had been transformed, and Zraz was pretty sure it was because he was a Snakeman to begin with, and thus had little to no actual experience with using psionics. He needed to find and contact the Mind, and he didn't know how to do that.

As for the thrall humans… well, that had been a dead end. Literally.

Zraz returned to a small cot to sleep for the night. He wasn't sure what had happened to their human thralls in the area, but the closest site he knew of had been abandoned. That left Plan C: he had a small radio that he had stolen, and he was trying to modify it to send a signal requesting pick up or assistance. Now, working on it, he was more hesitant. If the higher level human thralls had been apprehended by the planet's "XCOM" group then it was virtually certain that information about the radio distress protocol was in enemy hands.

Scratching the bug bites on his legs, Zraz made a warbling groan, the Snakeman vocalization for misery. The human body was alien, but surprisingly bearable in and of itself. It was dexterous; the muscles were different but pretty intuitive, and even picking up how to walking with it had been pretty easy. He didn't have any scales that needed grooming, either. At the same time, it was leaky, had way too many pores and other openings, and the human sense of smell was kind of disorienting. The ears were very sensitive, though, which Zraz approved of. All in all, it was a good body, but… strange. The thing was that he didn't want to be trapped in it for much longer.

He felt… lonely… and isolated being cut off from the Mind for so long. He was starting to think strange things, mostly regarding Sneer, who had ordered Zraz to stay behind. His doing so had allowed the remaining forces in the occupied Amazon village to keep the humans from getting near the Battleship as it took off, and they had even gotten at least one extra confirmed kill via blaster bomb. It was his own fault for trying to survive, but Zraz was starting to feel some sort of animosity towards Sneer. Had all that been worth all those Snakeman lives? They should have fallen back. The Battleship would have gotten shot up a bit, but barring some one in a million miracle blaster bomb hit to one of the engine pods, it would be fine.

Zraz needed to be part of the Mind again.

Even for just a few hours. If he was then it would mollify these antagonistic feelings he was having towards Sneer. It would also tell him how good or bad the situation was when it came to the human thralls. And what had happened with the other infiltrators? Had they found any of the human bases where they keep their kin? Finding one of those would be ideal, since even if they found one of the humans' buried bunkers those were always heavily defended by plasma weapons and the like. The human thralls believed that the so called "Sanctuary Colonies" were XCOM kept their families were largely undefended. At least from having a Terror Ship land and unload its cargo.

He would have to turn back into a Snakeman, if just for an hour. Zraz was sure that it was probably the right thing to do, even if it was risky. Looking around at the other humans in the shelter, he began to plan out how he would do it. He'd need a secluded spot and some hot and cold water. Maybe some more clothes to cover himself up. If he was spotted, even briefly, then the chance of him eventually ending up in XCOM hands increased ten fold. Just an hour, he promised himself. Sixty human minutes. Then he'd turn right back.

Definitely.

Well… maybe ninety minutes…

* * *

"… as you san see here, my team and I have assembled a biomechanical characterization chart outlining the relationships in observed muscle force against muscle length. Note the differences between the baseline human curves and those of our patients. Below, you can see our, ah, analysis of the muscle fascia…" 

Kasumi listened as Doctor Roane spoke, outlining the progress he had made on 'non-invasively characterizing' the 'trans-human physiological adaptations' in her friends' bodies. For her part, Kasumi was present at the conference table purely in the role of observer. She did a lot of work at the Bioshop Lab, and she had some important first hand experience and knowledge relating to the esoteric martial arts Doctor Roane occasionally referred to.

His was the last presentation of the day, and while most of what had been said by him and the other researchers was far over her head, Kasumi was glad she had come. It was good experience for when and if she pursued her own work. She was hoping to eventually get an Associate Degree in Emergency Medical Science, and research experience and/or participation was considered an important (though not strictly necessary) step in getting it. In UNETCO, the medical facility probably spent twice or three times as much time doing research than they did doing actual surgery or traditional medical practice. So participation in it was very important.

Matthew Roane paused in his presentation at it drew near the end. Most of it had been comparative charts and mathematical models describing their findings. By and large, it was confirmation of what was already obvious: Ranma and his friends were all super strong, super fast, and super tough. Most of them could kill an average person with a single blow. The real trick wouldn't be to just measure how different they were, but to find out why and how they got that way, and if it could be replicated consistently in others. Or that was what Doctor Roane had outlined as being part of the goal of their research.

Kasumi listened and reached for a slice of pizza in the center of the table. She was a little ashamed to admit that ever since she'd come to Seiran Mountain, she had developed a secret craving for the footstuff. The pizza here was distinctly American: messy and greasy and covered in cheese and meat. It was so terribly hedonistic and delicious, and so unlike the food she normally cooked for her sisters and father. Year after year, she had refined her cooking, perfecting traditional Japanese dishes until she was as good as mother had been. She had dismissed most foreign foods as being an unwanted disruption of that comforting and reliable routine.

Oh, but pizza! With globs of melting hot cheese, and what had to be three types of sausage, and bits of ham…! Further up the table, there were two slices of Hawaiian pizza, too. The box with the 'ranch and chicken' was empty. It was just terrible that she had picked up such a liking for gaijin food! Hopefully, no one outside the Med Lab's weekly meetings would ever know. Nibbling on the slice she had retrieved, and pouring out another cup of soda pop, she turned her attention back to the presentation.

"So: what else can account for these changes in protein structure? Or the density and organization of bone? I think it is clear that there is no analogue in the natural world for what we've seen…"

Doctor Roane changed to the next slide on the computer, and the screen next to him changed to show a picture of two fetuses and two side by side charts.

"This is from a paper done by Trenchard _et al_. I'm sure most everyone here has seen or heard of it before. This one is part of the series of experiments done on Developmental Xenomorphology and Xenogenesis in Ethereals. In this experiment, two Ethereals were grown _in vitro_ using the alien xenogenesis protocols documented by Cooke and associates. Both were recovered from AB-006 at identical stages of development. In one, the alien was allowed to develop in a conscious state, and given identical mental stimulation… just like if the aliens had been growing the clone. The other was allowed to develop in an unconscious state."

The next slide showed two aliens, still side by side in alien incubation tanks. One looked to be dead, or near dead. It was severely malnourished. The muscles were shriveled, and the pale purple skin sagged or pulled back tight over different parts of the body. The genitalia were gone. Next to it, the other alien was far more robust. Strong muscles covered the arms and legs. The skin was smooth and healthy looking, without disfigurements or blotching. Two strange claspers, like a shark's, hung between the legs.

Matthew Roane coughed to clear his throat, and then continued, "This experiment, later repeated using DNA samples of a different Ethereal, and with similar results, proved that Ethereal body modification is not done through genetic tampering or surgery, as in the case of Sectoids or Floaters. The modification is developmental and incremental, self-inflicted if you will, and occurs _in vivo_. It is still unknown what exact external stimulation, if any, prompts the conscious self-modification of living tissues to occur."

"It is ironic that, we believe, the closest approximation to the changes in human tissues between our patients and those of baseline humans is how Ethereals destroy most of their body, rerouting all their efforts to feeding the brain with blood. This explains the difficulties we have had in the Bio Shop synthesizing replacement tissues and grafts of our 'martial artist' patients. These tissues do not display the rigorous self-organization and modification observed in the people we grow them for…"

Doctor Roane changed the slide again, showing several side by side nerve cells.

"We firmly believe that all eight of our patients have, through their so called martial arts training, either consciously or unconsciously used their telekinetic affinities to re-model much of their body. Here, you can see alpha motor neurons, scanned from identical locations on different people. The first one here is that of a baseline human. The second belongs to Special Lieutenant Saotome. They are all ordered from that point on from highest observed instantaneous transmission velocity to slowest… the slowest still being almost an order of magnitude faster than baseline."

He then pointed to a chart below the figure.

"Here, we have extrapolated nerve transmission speed _in vivo_ versus _in vitro_, using cells and cloned tissue. Note the differences in ITV, as well as structure. The cloned neurons operated at around peak human velocity, but no where near expected levels. Also, as you can see, ah, not only are the modified accelerant structures missing in the cloned neurons, but… here… you can see that there is a clear level of development of these modifications as we progress from, for example, Squaddie Kuno, to Lieutenant Saotome…"

It was certainly interesting from a clinical perspective, Kasumi could admit that, but to her most of it was just reiteration of what her father had always told them: that a great martial artist would train to overcome any physical limitation. Obviously, this meant that something had to occur within the body. Bones became stronger, joints adapted to absorb greater shock and other forces… muscles contracted faster and with greater force, and reflexes improved. But martial artists on that level were also a secretive lot by nature. They hid their abilities and techniques. As far as she knew, no one had ever really investigated their special abilities from a purely scientific vantage point.

For a few minutes after his conclusion, Doctor Roane fielded questions and comments from the other staff, including a few from Doctor Pearson who had overall authority for the ongoing experiment. Kasumi wouldn't have minded asking him what he thought the ramifications of the research would be regarding how her friends did their training, if any, but it was a seemingly very unprofessional question compared to the ones brought up by the accomplished scientists around the table. So she kept quiet, but strongly considered asking him about it later.

If she was lucky, she could come up with some kind of scientific evidence that could convince Ryouga to take it easy on himself. It just wasn't healthy, the self mutilation of his hands and the growing mental instability he tapped into… Even the base physiatrist thought the same way: that he was going overboard. However, in UNETCO, a base psych or doctor didn't have the authority that he or she did in a normal military outfit. In XCOM, it fell to the regional commander to make that call, and Commander Yasuda seemed more than willing to let Ryouga continue in whatever way he deemed to be most effective, even if was self destructive.

Kasumi waited patiently for the weekly conference to dissolve, which it did after Doctor Pearson stood and gave some closing remarks about the direction of their research and the status of their Bioshop clinical reserves. Gathering up the notes she had taken along with other print outs and papers, she clipped them together and headed for the door. Doctor Roane was there, discussing something with Doctor Li, and he smiled in an unabashed way when he saw her and motioned her over.

"Doctor Li," she bowed to the older man. He was Taiwanese and around forty, and worked in the Xeno-studies department. She then did the same to Doctor Roane. "Doctor Roane."

"Kasumi, come on!" he laughed with a hearty deep voice. "You can call me Matt, you know. Doctor Roane makes me sound old!"

"Miss Tendo," Doctor Li said, inclining his head. He then turned back to Doctor Roane. "We'll have to look into that Muton issue another time, Matthew. I'll see if I can get through to Jamie over in Andermatt."

"Keep me in the loop. Cc the emails or something." Doctor Roane said as parting, and the older man left out the conference room door. He then faced Kasumi. "What's up?"

"Matt," she said, and shyly held her clip board to her chest. How could she phrase it without sounding foolish? "I was wondering if… if any of your findings… if they could be used to persuade a friend of mine. Um. Special Lieutenant Hibiki. If you could convince him to train less… destructively…?"

Roane 'hmm'ed and rubbed the stubble on his cheek while he thought about it.

"The problem," he replied. "Is that I've mostly being doing observation and extrapolation. I don't think I have enough data yet to be able to say 'this training produces these results in every case' or anything like that. Eventually I hope to, but right now, there are too many variables. I guess you could make a hypothetical case or one using some conjecture, but… I mean, it wouldn't be scientifically accurate."

"I'd still like to try," Kasumi said. "Anything would help, I think."

Roane nodded slowly. "I think I understand. Ok. Let's talk about it. You guys are having a get together at the Dojo today, aren't you? Watching Braveheart, right?"

"At twenty two hundred hours, yes."

"The email said it was open house, and I wouldn't mind giving it a go. I'm still on the clock right now, but how about we plan out what you'll say then?"

Kasumi smiled happily, and bowed her head deeply. "Thank you… Matt. Thank you very much."

He chuckled and patted her on the shoulder.

"I'm sure everything will turn out just fine, Kasumi. Even if we can't convince him to change his routine, Lieutenant Hibiki seems to know what he's doing…"

He walked off, heading back to the labs, but his last few words had given Kasumi some small pause. There was nothing overt about it, but she couldn't shake the feeling that Doctor Roane's connection to Ryouga was more than just observation and study. _'Lieutenant Hibiki seems to know what he's doing?'_ he had said. What did Doctor Roane think the lost boy was doing? Kasumi knew, and she couldn't say it was very encouraging or that she approved.

* * *


	68. Comrades II

* * *

She had been one of the last people he'd expected to see at his door. Ryouga stared at her in mute surprise for a few seconds; finding himself at an embarrassing lack of words. From the start, no one but Ranma (and, more recently, his mother Mitsuko) had attempted to intrude on his personal time. Most of his interactions with other people were based around their professional interests or occupations, and a large part of him was happy with how uncomplicated and impersonal that sort of life was. 

The Hibiki condition lent itself well to hermitage.

As often proved to be the case, Shirokuro proved herself sociable enough for the both of them, wagging her tail and panting happily at the appearance of someone she identified as a 'family friend.' His guest smiled down at the black and white canine, scratching behind the friendly dog's left ear before looking back up at him with hopeful eyes.

"Can I come in, Ryouga-kun?" Akane asked, looking just past where he stood to see the rest of his living quarters. He noted her interest with no small amount of nervousness (followed quickly by a brief flash of suspicion), and cleared his throat before responding.

"Of course, Akane-san." He stepped aside and gestured for her to enter. "Please."

"Thank you," she replied, bowing politely.

He had always liked that about her; he had a soft spot for nice, polite girls, and when she wasn't lost in a Ranma-induced rage, Akane was usually a very kind person. In her presence, especially alone and in her presence, he could feel a glimmer of that heat that had so suffused his life from before. But there were gaps, holes, in his memory and in his heart, and none more so than where Akane was involved. It made him uncomfortable in a way very removed from appetent infatuation.

Shirokuro yipped playfully, and made a quick pounce so Akane could catch her paws and support her on her two hind legs. From the beginning, the Hibiki family guide and companion had taken a quick and instinctive liking for the youngest Tendo. He remembered that clearly, at least. Shirokuro had normally impeccable taste in those she trusted… even her liking for that bastard Ranma had, eventually, proven intuitive. The pigtailed martial artist was an arrogant, short sighted, greedy son-of-a-panda, but his heart was generally in the right place. He and Akane were alike in that way: if you could avoid pressing their buttons, and they were big ones, then they were both good people who often went out of their way to help others. Of course, in Ranma's case, he was usually just fixing problems he or his father had caused in the first place.

_"Ryouga-sama!" he remembered, suddenly. He would never forget that special and wonderful way Akari said his name, like he was the most special man in her life. "Did you see the invitation I left out? The one from Akane and Ranma?"_

_"Yeah… I got one, too. Even made it to the ceremony," he remembering replying, holding the wedding invitation tightly in one hand. Gritting his teeth, he had bitterly added, "Good for them."_

Ryouga blinked, hard, and headed towards the back of the room. "I have a mini fridge back here. Can I get you anything, Akane-san?"

"Maybe some water. I…" she hesitated, and he detected a tremor in her voice. "I wanted to talk about something."

The spike of anxiety returned. He may not have had memories about what he had done as P-chan, but he knew in general what had happened. It was something that would probably hang over his head the rest of his life, at least when he was around her. There was no telling when she would finally put two and two together, and he had no idea what he would say or do when that time came.

"Really?" he asked, trying to affect an air of uncharacteristic pococurantism. Retrieving a small handful of ice, he dropped it in a glass cup and took out one of the bottles of spring water in the fridge. He had learned, long ago, that it was always useful to have a bottle of water handy. When Akane replied, she sounded nervous, not angry, dispelling some of his own creeping anxiety.

"It… its sort of… well, I didn't know who else to talk about it with…"

He saw her looking at some of the memorabilia laid out near his desk and computer. His living quarters on base were rather more Spartan than his room back home, but he'd still taken the opportunity to clutter much of it with memorabilia collected during his last few 'training trips.' There were pendants from different college campuses and stadiums he'd wandered through, touristy trinkets he'd bought on a lark here and there, and a few trophies he'd kept with him to remember a few fights by. He had a small collection of dojo signs from around Japan, too, with some of the recent and more impressive ones hanging from the wall.

"The Benten Daiba School?" Akane asked, touching one of the battle-won signs. "You beat Masahiko-sensei?"

"That was about a year ago, I think," he replied, smiling a bit at the memory. "I do a lot of training in Hokkaido… it is in Hokkaido, right?"

Akane giggled, and took the offered glass of water. Normally, when people made light of his directional dysfunction he got angry, but this time, it actually helped to put him at ease. Had Ukyou or Shampoo acted and spoken in the exact same manner, he probably would have fumed. It was an odd thing to realize, like meeting up with an old friend you hadn't seen in years and only half remembered.

"Thanks, Ryouga-kun," she said, and nodded at the sign. "It's Hokkaido. Masahiko-sensei is an old friend of my father's, but I haven't seen him since I was little."

"It was a good match," Ryouga's praise was entirely grounded in the Art, which should have come to no one's surprise.

Akane smiled as she thought of something. "Ryouga-kun, how come you never tried to take our sign?"

The obvious answer was that he liked the Tendos, and didn't want to embarrass them by taking their sign. But there was no great shame in losing the sign to a worthy and honorable opponent. Many students were shamed and broken up when it happened, but that was just part of the Martial Arts lifestyle, and Ryouga had never met a master who didn't realize that. Many had done some traveling and dojo challenging themselves.

A true Dojo Destroyer would take the sign and did have the 'right' to demand that the dojo itself close until it got it back, but those sorts were very rare in the modern era. Everyone knew that without some sort of interdisciplinary rivalry martial arts in general would stagnate and become purely ceremonial, and in any fight, someone won and someone lost. It was what followed the fight that mattered the most. In all his years visiting Nerima, Ryouga had never once thought about the Tendo Dojo that way: it was more a home, or a valued rest spot between wanderings.

"It… It never actually occurred to me," he admitted. "You guys were always… so kind to me, and I was usually fighting with Ranma when I was around. I only challenge a dojo for a day's room and board and to get out of the rain... or if one of their practitioners insulted me."

Akane continued to stare at the dojo signs, a melancholy expression creeping over her face. He watched her, and noticed that her hair looked more ruffled than usual, like she had just gotten out of bed. She was dressed normally, though, in the standard UNETCO uniform, and it was almost the middle of the day. Then he remembered that Akane and her squad had just come off duty and arrived at the base earlier this morning. Maybe she had been sleeping; but why on Earth was she here, now?

"You and Ranma… you two are so amazing…" she said and closed her eyes.

Somehow, missing memories aside, he recognized that tone of voice. But the anger it usually evoked never clouded his mind; never blotted out the initial rise of concern and empathy. He wasn't a complete idiot, even when it came to girls, and especially not when it came to Akane.

"Ranma?" he asked, softly. "Akane-san, what's wrong?"

To his surprise, she changed the subject.

"You can call me Akane, you know. Or even Akane-chan. I mean, Ryouga-kun…" she turned a little, just enough to look at him out of the corner of her eye. "We've known each other; we've been friends, for almost three years. You're…" She hung her head again and closed her eyes tightly. "You're the best guy friend I have. You're like a brother to me..."

Ryouga tried to keep his own expression from showing the shame he felt at hiding his most damning secret from her. Not only the one about being P-chan, but the fact that he had been trying for most of those three years to get her to see him as more than just a friend. In truth, was he really better than Kuno or Gosunkugi?

"Akane…" he began, and asked again, "What's wrong?"

"It's… It's that baka!" She stomped her foot and shook her head angrily. As she turned around he could see ears welling up in her eyes. "That idiot! Why is he… why can't he be… just… not such a jerk? All the time? I can't believe I… I…"

To Ryouga's surprise, she buried her face in his chest, pounding a fist against his shoulder. His eyebrows rose, not only from the shock of her acting like this, but from the physical blow – which he had actually felt. There were elite Special Forces soldiers on this base who would probably have been on the floor writhing in agony from that one blow. Which meant that somewhere, Ranma had to be nursing a black eye or worse.

Putting aside that thought, he looked down at Akane, and realized he had no idea what to do to comfort her. Imagining himself as P-chan (not a pleasant thing), he figured he could just sit around and listen to her problems, or maybe get squeezed like a plush toy. He was pretty sure he had done that in his cursed form many times, because he often thought about it when he was a human, too. This was different, though. She knew who he was, that he was a person and not an animal, and she seemed to expect something besides mute sympathy.

"I'm… sorry…" he offered. Apologies were a good conservative route to take when it came to girls. Even Akari had gotten mad a few times, and usually an apology followed by nodding his head a bit had sorted the problem out. Luckily, he hadn't needed to use the dreaded Saotome Style _Crouch of the Wild Tiger_ Technique yet.

Akane sniffled again, and pounded his shoulder again. Sardonically, he wondered if she had come to him because she knew she could beat on him without it crippling him for life.

"Um?" he cleared his throat again, and twiddled his fingers impotently. He remembered hugging her before, when she was frightened, but couldn't quite find the resolve to do much more than pat her on the back.

"What, uh, happened?" he asked, though he could guess. Akane grabbed his shirt, and he could see she was blushing. That was another odd reaction.

"Promise… you won't, um, talk to anyone about it?"

That was strange, too. Ranma and Akane fighting about something was hardly a state secret - public spectacle maybe. Or something akin to a car crash.

"Of course not…"

"Ranma and I…" she started, but couldn't seem to bear to continue. "We…"

"You…?"

"He does love me, doesn't he?"

It was yet another strange question to ask. Not so much to ask _in general _or_ in theory_, but to ask him. He considered, for just a moment, asking her why she thought he would know, but looking down at her, he realized he couldn't. Akane, like most of the girls, somehow figured that he and Ranma were best friends. Well, the Tendo girls seemed to think that. At least Shampoo and Ukyou knew better. He and Ranma were rivals. It was… different…

Kind of.

"Ranma would kill to protect you, Akane," Ryouga tried to explain; leaving out that he would do the same, even now. After a few seconds, and realizing that he wasn't going to elaborate, she pushed off his chest and looked up at him.

"That's not the same thing…" she said, anger in her voice. "He doesn't _trust_ me!"

This was rapidly getting way out of his league.

"I don't understand…" he murmured.

"You let Akari train her sumo pigs, right?" Akane asked, though normally everyone skirted around saying the name of the poor girl for his sake. Akari and Akane had been friends, though, and caught up in the moment, he was really too stunned to think much about the guilt he felt.

"Yes?" he offered.

"Even though they're all much bigger than she is?" she pressed on with the questions. "Even though it must be dangerous?"

He drew back a bit. Female anger was scary! And confusing.

"Yes?" He asked, hoping it would placate her. "I mean, she'd been doing it for years already…"

"Exactly!" Akane poked him in the chest, hard, too. He stood there, still stunned, and she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand before crossing her arms in vexation.

"I had hoped… I thought that we were getting closer. That we understood each other." Akane's mercurial temper flared, and he could see and feel it in her aura. It was cloudy, though, and unfocused. Akane was like that: even angry, she couldn't really lose herself in the hate, or the depression, or any one emotion.

"Did he say something…?" Ryouga guessed.

"Do you have to ask?" Akane stomped her foot again. "Of course he said something! That jerk! You know I just got back last night… or this morning… but I just got back, so I went to see him…"

"You went to see him?" he asked, raising a curious eyebrow. "In the middle of the night?"

Akane blushed, and Ryouga swore that he saw a shade of pink in her aura. What the hell did that mean? Between Ranma and himself, he'd seen quite a few emotion based aura colors, but never pink before.

"We… we got into a fight…" Akane said her voice barely more than a murmur. "I just want… I just want him to see me as an equal. He said, he said…"

"Akane," Ryouga interrupted her, and sighed. "Ranma… is Ranma. He's always going to think he's the best. He's always going to try and protect you, even if you don't want him to. He's a hard headed jerk who thinks his shit smells like roses. That's who he is. That's probably how he'll always be. You've just got to… kind of… roll with it…"

It obviously wasn't the sort of answer she had expected to hear.

"What?" Akane asked, confusion and anger playing across her features.

"I can't say I really understand the sort of relationship you two have," Ryouga quickly explained, hoping to forestall any more problems of this nature. He only really had one point of reference to offer, and he wasn't sure how applicable it was. "When Akari and I first met… there was some confusion… at one point, she thought she had to change herself to get me to like her. But she couldn't be happy like that, and I wouldn't want a girlfriend who couldn't be herself around me. I mean: we all want to be accepted for who we are, right?"

"But…" Akane blinked a few times, at something of a loss for words. "But, he… he's, and he… you didn't hear the things he said to me!"

"Like what?" he asked, and promised himself that if Ranma had really said anything bad, really bad, that he would take it out on the pigtailed boy's hide first chance he got. He still felt for Akane, though he couldn't say it was love without P-chan's memories, not in comparison to how he felt for Akari, and at a fundamental level, he just couldn't bear to see a girl cry.

"Like…" She thought for a few seconds, though she did relax her posture somewhat and even calm down a little. Uncrossing her arms, Akane pretended to be her fiancé, and pointed at the lost boy.

"'Who are you kidding? You'll just get hurt if you try to train with us!'" she said, trying to mimic Ranma's tone of voice. "And 'A clumsy girl like you shouldn't be out there risking her life!' And, and… what else? He said he wouldn't want me on his team, and that he didn't need my help, and… and a lot of other terrible things!"

"Ranma…" Ryouga sighed, and scratched the back of his head behind his bandanna. "Well, he didn't want you fighting. He never did. You know that."

"I know!" Akane pounced on that statement like it was an indictment. "But you'd think he'd be happy for me, I mean… I did it… _I kind of did it_, for him. I… why does he want me to be the only one who has to stay behind and worry? I'm… I can help, damnit! I can fight! I can contribute!"

"I know…"

"I even train with you guys sometimes!" Akane said, and spun around. "Why won't he let me train with his squad? Why does he think I'm so weak?!"

"Akane," Ryouga quickly said, and placed a hand on her shoulder to try and calm her. "He doesn't want to see anything happen to you. You've almost been hurt too many times… and Saffron almost killed you…"

"Are you taking his side, Ryouga-kun?" She asked, almost incredulously.

"I'm not on any side," he replied, and looked her in the eyes. "But, you guys… you two need to work this out or something. I can't do anything about it! I don't know much of anything about relationships!"

Akane's head sank, along with her hopes.

"We're… not good at talking…" she admitted.

"I don't think any of us are," he said, and she perked up a bit. "We do most of our talking with our fists, after all."

"I've never liked a guy… like I like Ranma," she said, slowly. "But he makes me so angry sometimes…!"

"Same here," he assured her, then quickly added. "Not the liking him part… just the angry part."

"What about the koi rod?" Akane asked, a little slyly. "Why did you…?"

"That was a misunderstanding. A big one!"

He let her go and frowned at the memory. His intended target had actually been her. Not that he thought it would actually work, and make her his love slave or anything, but that had been the intention. Gods: what the Hell had he been thinking? Desperate loneliness and curiosity were definitely bad companions. And, really, what had that vendor been doing, selling trinkets that dangerous and unethical?

Akane nodded, accepting his half assed explanation.

"I'm going to talk to him again," she said, resolved and sure it was the right thing to at least try and do. "Thanks, Ryouga-kun."

He rubbed his shoulder where she had hit him. "Yeah. Any time, I guess."

Sitting on the floor nearby, Shirokuro cocked her head to the side at the two strange humans. Akane and Ryouga talked a little more, mostly her trying out loud the sort of things she would ask, and soon her glass of water was empty. Putting it down on his desk, and making as if to leave, she paused.

"Is this what I think it is?" she asked, and picked up a few pieces of paper.

"I'm doing some work on Martial Arts Calligraphy," Ryouga replied, and reached for the documents.

"Ryouga-kun! You have such good penmanship! These are all so intricate and beautiful!" Akane said, and quickly started flipping through them. "Except for this one. You know, I swear I've seen this one before…"

Ryouga chuckled nervously, trying to gently get the papers out of her hands. "Maybe. Maybe. Please don't get them out of order… Akane!"

"Like a stupid looking smiley face or something…" she mused, and Ryouga finally deftly plucked the papers out of her grasp.

"Uh, um, well…" He muttered.

"You'll have to tell me about it later," Akane finally said, and started towards the door. "Wish me luck, Ryouga-kun!"

He stood by the door as she left, wished her luck, and when she was gone he sighed in unabashed relief. Shaking his head, Ryouga put the papers back on the desk and fell back on his bed. Peeking out from under a complex calligraphy chart was a simple and goofy looking smiley face with swirly cheeks and big googly eyes. Notations in pencil surrounded it, along with neat equations and references. Written in English yellow post-it note, folded neatly in half, were the words:

TOP SECRET - OFANIM / 4E  
Project Cataphract  
STUDY 26 Class - A  
Kimen Style: God of War  
[Marishiten Kuroniku

Less than a minute later, Shirokuro barked, and Ryouga rolled off the bed just in time to hear the door buzzer go off. Walking past the faithful canine, he patted her on the head, and reached over to key open the door.

'This better not be who I think it is…'

Sure enough, the door opened, and there stood Ranma Saotome, sporting one Hell of a shiner around his left eye.

"Rough night?" Ryouga asked, and Ranma grinned despite his appearance and condition.

"Somethin' like that," the pigtailed teen admitted. "Got a minute?"

"I guess…" Ryouga, despite it all, couldn't turn away his old enemy. Ranma strode right in, like he owned the place, grabbed a chair and collapsed in it.

"Man oh man," Ranma groaned. "This was a bad one…"

"Akane was just here," Ryouga said, walking over to his desk. He quickly grabbed the papers Akane had glanced at before and put a paper clip on them.

"I know. That's one of the reasons I came too."

"I don't know why you two don't go see a councilor or something…" The lost boy casually slipped the papers away into one of the desk drawers and closed it.

"Cause we're friends, man!" Ranma said with a smile, as Shirokuro licked his hand. "I mean, if I can talk to anyone about, you know, this kind stuff… it's you! Same goes for Akane."

Ryouga's eyes wandered, briefly, to where he'd stashed the papers on Project Cataphract. It was bad enough that Akane had gotten a look at them, but he couldn't risk Ranma seeing them, too. Still, hiding it from someone who had just professed being willing to trust you didn't sit well in the pit of the lost one's stomach.

"Alright," Ryouga said, leaning against the desk and trying to appear casual. "But Akane's already looking for you."

"That's ok," Ranma replied clearly glad that he had someone to talk to. "I just need to get this off my chest without being beaten on, threatened, or sexually assaulted. Besides, you're the only guy I know who… had a normal relationship, ya know? So, ok, it was like this: …"

Ryouga listened, but his thoughts lingered on the shameful secret he had stuffed into his desk drawer. He reminded himself that he wasn't being selfish, he was being prudent. He was being responsible. The others wouldn't understand, at least not yet. If he moved too soon, pushed them too far, then it could ruin everything he and Commander Yasuda hoped to achieve…

* * *

**From**: SLt. Hibiki Ryouga  
**Sent**: Monday, December 7, 2006, 8:21  
**To**: Tendo Nabiki  
**Subject**: Re: That thing I sent you

Meet me for lunch. I'm taking Shirokuro for a walk afterwards and you can come with me.

-Hibiki

* * *


	69. Comrades III

-----

Mitsuko sat opposite her son in the base cafeteria, glad that he and Shirokuro had been able to find her and lead her here. Even with maps on every other wall, the base was like a multi-layered maze, and only by virtue of it being a limited and enclosed space full of people could she find her way around. Half the time she tried to get somewhere, she ended up nearly walking into a security checkpoint or some other hazardous location. There was something to be said for persistence, though. Sooner or later, she got where she wanted to.

Shirokuro had stuck by Ryouga, and Mitsuko hadn't tried to persuade the family dog otherwise. Her son was an important person here, with work and appointments and responsibilities. Her own activities were personal and trivial in comparison. Her son, now a man, who she had often worried about; he had found a place… an important place, where people respected him. That was always hard for a Hibiki. Tetsuya had always been a very social person, but even he had few truly reliable friends, and most of those were college buddies in the States.

"Nodoka said that, did she?" he asked, taking a drink from his glass of water. "I wouldn't get involved if I were you."

It was still hard to believe that her son, her baby, was now a man. He was around the same age she and Tetsuya had been when they met. For more than a decade, all they had known of each other, the sum total of their interaction, had been notes posted on the fridge or the occasional telephone call. Now that they could, and wanted to, sit down face to face every day or so and talk… it was sort of hard to feel out just what to say. So far, they had felt comfortable enough together to talk about other people, bits of gossip, martial arts, and even some politics. Mitsuko was hesitant, though, to press any further on his personal life or problems.

Those would have to come in time.

"Why's that?" she asked, referring to her son's suggestion that she not get involved in any 'Saotome match making schemes.'

"These things always end badly," Ryouga replied, and used the side of his fork to cleanly separate and scoop out a small mouthful of the food she had made for him. It was pretty plain: chicken on rice and an omelet. It was lunch time, but she knew Ryouga usually didn't eat in the morning, and both he and his father had liked the way she made omelets back when they had been together, all those years ago. It was a good guess as to what he would like.

"I think we'll all be happier if we just let things run their course," he concluded, and chewed thoughtfully on the food.

"It has been two years…"

"Trust me," Ryouga said, with some evasiveness. "Things are, um, better between them then you'd think."

"Then you don't think he's interested in any of these other girls Nodoka mentioned?" Mitsuko asked, implying 'what do you think about them?'

"Ranma's an attention hog. It feeds his ego, and he uses his ego to fight. That's probably as far as his interest goes… except maybe with Ukyou."

"That's the_kansai_ girl, right? Kazuo's daughter?"

He nodded.

"She seems like a nice girl," Mitsuko noted, though she only knew Ukyou from appearance and her father's hearsay.

"Ukyou's alright," Ryouga replied, but didn't elaborate. "A good fighter, too. Works hard."

"That's what you said about Akane, too."

"Is it?"

She nodded, and repeated what he had said just a few minutes ago: "Nice girl. Pretty good fighter. Works hard."

Ryouga made a soft 'hmmm' sound, and took another drink of water.

Mitsuko sighed at his reluctance to go into any real detail about what he thought of the others. When she asked about his friends, he mostly talked about their techniques, where they were planning to improve, and how they performed during missions. It wasn't that he was being un-talkative with her, either. When they had talked about the economy, he had spoken with passion about some of the people down on their luck that he had met and helped out during his travels, and the villages and elderly couples in the countryside that were having a hard time. He also seemed quite happy to talk about the status of natural parks in Japan… it was just the personal part of himself that he kept locked away from her.

The one name she really wanted to bring up: Akari Unryu; she knew she couldn't. Ryouga had left more than a few messages on the fridge about her, and according to Tetsuya, he had even started going steady with the girl. Now she was gone. According to Nodoka (who had heard it from her husband), Akari had been killed by the aliens at some point. The exact details, though, and how it had affected her son, all remained a mystery. Probably one she wouldn't begin to unravel for some time yet.

"So what is Nodoka planning to do?" he asked, deftly realigning the topic.

"Nothing yet, but she wants to talk to Ranma about the dowries involved. The Kunos are supposed to have offered a very large piece of land and more than enough money to build a new dojo…"

"That'll never happen," Ryouga interrupted, and scoffed. "Kodachi's borderline insane. You don't marry a girl you're afraid of. What about the others? This is the first I've heard of it."

"Apparently Kazuo and Genma got into a little fight the other day…" Mitsuko's tone of voice made it obvious that 'little fight' was probably a significant understatement. "Now he's demanding the Saotomes pay him back for stealing Ukyou's original dowry. Except the only one in the family actually making money is Ranma."

"His store was destroyed. In fact, so was Ukyou's…" Ryouga shook his head in sympathy. "I can understand his concern. After they leave here, he and Ukyou will have a hard time rebuilding their restaurants."

"That Chinese girl made it clear she's no longer interested…"

"I heard about that one. No more Amazon village and all that."

"And then there's the Tendos." Mitsuko leaned back in her chair and shrugged. "They still have the Dojo, and Soun wants to pass it on to Ranma, but… you know. Plus, Akane going out and fighting… I've never seen a grown man cry so much!"

Ryouga finished chewing another bite of the omelet, and wiped his lips with his thumb, which he then cleaned off with a paper napkin. For a few seconds, he seemed to be remembering something, or thinking deeply about what she had said, but then he shrugged again, affecting an air of indifference.

"Akane's old enough to make her own decisions and look after herself. So is Ranma. I know they're his parents, but Nodoka and Genma need to realize that it isn't their business what happens between those two. A promise between martial artists and rivals…"

Ryouga closed his eyes briefly, and she could guess he was paralleling promises he and Ranma had made to Soun and Genma's vow to unite the schools.

"Those sorts of things are important… but not legally binding. If it works out between them, then good. If not. Life goes on."

He opened his eyes again, and concentrated on finishing his food.

"Ryouga… did you ever have any girls fighting over you?"

So abrupt and expected was her question that he actually swallowed food down the wrong pipe. Coughing wildly, he had to beat his chest a few times and take a long drink of water to get it under control. When he finally got around to staring at her with unabashed consternation, Mitsuko already had a small playful smile on her face.

Then, to her surprise, he blushed.

"Not… that I recall…" he said, between muffled coughs. "No."

But at the same time, he couldn't help thinking, 'P-chan, on the other hand...'

"Ryouga-kun!"

They both turned as someone new casually walked up to the table. Mitsuko recognized it as one of Soun's daughters: the middle one with the short hair. She couldn't remember what he name was, though. In fact, while Soun had spoken glowingly about Kasumi, the eldest, and had cried profusely about Akane, the youngest, she couldn't recall ever hearing anything about this one. She wore the same UNETCO uniform her son and all the others did, but the rim around the security ID clipped onto her left breast pocket was gold instead of blue or red.

Ryouga raised a hand in greeting. "Oh, Nabiki. I almost forgot."

"Well, that's flattering!" Nabiki (Mitsuko made a mental note to remember it) pouted, and teasingly waved a brown manila folder with her free hand. "And after all this time and work, too! Almost forgot, he says!"

"Right. Right. Sorry 'bout that…" he turned to face his mother and made quickie introductions. "Mom. This is Nabiki. I asked her to meet up with me here. Work related stuff, you understand."

"Of course I do." Mitsuko stood up, and offered Nabiki her hand in American fashion. She had been trying to reacquire to her old U.S. habits since moving to the base, which was staffed with predominantly American and Commonwealth peoples. Surprisingly, Nabiki took her hand and shook it heartily and without hesitation. Mitsuko took a mental note that the girl seemed to adapt to new conditions very quickly.

"Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Hibiki," Nabiki said in perfect English. Better, in fact, than Mitsuko's own… though she had at least learned hers' entirely the old fashioned way.

"Likewise," Mitsuko replied, and took the opportunity to send a small pulse of _ki_ down her arm and into the Tendo girl's hand. It was totally harmless, but it would reveal both Nabiki's aura, and if she had any experience in detecting _ki_ itself. Like a sonar pulse, Mitsuko waited for anything to bounce back, but after a second or so it was clear that this girl had about the same level of _ki _development as a normal person.

'Not a martial artist, then? Not even any higher level awareness?' she thought, but kept it to herself.

"Well. Time to take Shirokuro for a walk…" Ryouga quickly finished off his food, took a quick drink of water, and stood up. Shirokuro, who had been curled up under the table, emerged with jingle-jingle sound; the metal tags on her collar chiming together. The black and white dog was already wagging her tail, having heard and identified the words 'Shirokuro' and 'walk' in the same sentence (even in English).

"Why don't I come with you?" Nabiki smiled, and Mitsuko could tell it was the kind of grin that implied she knew far, far more than she ever let on at any one time. It also implied she was rather smug about that fact, too.

"That might be the most convenient thing," Ryouga agreed, though he didn't seem to worry much about the intrusion of the company. Even knowing him as little as she did, it wasn't hard for Mitsuko to see that her son had been expecting this. Ryouga wasn't that good at hiding his expressions, though he was pretty accomplished at avoiding answering unwanted questions. Wiping his hands off, Ryouga grabbed the papers and notes he had left on the table.

"I'll see you later, mom. The food was great, by the way," he added with a warm smile. For a moment, it reminded her of Tetsuya. Then he waved to her and headed for the exit, following Shirokuro, and with Nabiki close behind.

Mitsuko Hibiki took a slow drink from her glass. "Hmm…"

* * *

"So what did you and my would-be brother-in-law talk about?"

"Huh!" Ryouga huffed, partly at the question, and partly at the audacity and confidence with which it was delivered. "And what would you know about that?"

Nabiki chuckled in a mischievous manner, and he found himself rolling his eyes.

"Akane came to me when she couldn't find Ranma. It was pretty obvious he'd gone to see you. Or maybe hide in your room," she explained, enjoying the whole business altogether too much. To him, she seemed like the type who, if they became a super villain, could never resist laying out their elaborate evil schemes. "So what did you two boys 'rap' about?"

Ryouga huffed again, keeping quiet.

"Let me guess, then," she began, coyly. "He splashed himself with cold water, cried in your arms and you gently…"

"**Nabiki!**"

"I didn't even get to the good part of it yet!" Nabiki laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. "Boy are you easy to tease!"

"And you like pressing people's buttons…." Ryouga sighed and shrugged. "Since I know you'll keep at it until you find out, I'll tell you: we didn't talk _about_anything. He said some stuff, I said some stuff, and then we… we…"

She was all smiles as she milked him for what she suspected was juicy info. "You what?"

"…" Ryouga looked at her, face completely serious. "We played video games."

Nabiki's expression froze, and she deflated visibly. "Whaaaat? That's all?"

He shrugged again.

"I didn't even know you played video games…" Nabiki slowly said, remembering not a single time (well, except for that game of foosball and those games of shoji) that she had ever seen the lost boy and his rival competing in any way short of trying to pound the other into the dust. Ranma played with his other non-martial artist friends, yes, but Ryouga?

"I _don't_ play video games," the lost one admitted, with more than a trace of annoyance. "Which was why Ranma beat me every time. …That rotten cheater."

Nabiki could practically see the little depressed clouds floating around his head. Still, the thought that just being able to outshine his rival in something, anything, probably would cheer up the pigtailed fighter… she laughed. Here she and Akane had been having serious heart to heart talks about boys and relationships (Nabiki was still the only one of them to have had real boyfriends before), while Ranma had just been beating Ryouga at Super Smash Brothers or something. Add to that that it seemed like Ryouga had really wanted to win even at something he'd never thought about or considered before…

"Well, I'm glad I could bring amusement to two people's lives today," Ryouga deadpanned.

"And I'm glad I was one of those two," she replied, enjoying the sour look he tried to use to hide a smile of his own. "You going to see the movie tonight? You and the rest of your demolition squad are headed out tomorrow, aren't you?"

"Yeah. We're headed off to baby sit Ranma's little friends on the outside for a few days." He then considered the other question. "Which is why I have a lot of work to do tonight, and…"

"You should come, Ryouga-kun."

He stared at her, expecting a reason to follow her statement. For a few seconds, they walked down the hall in silence, following Shirokuro. Nabiki didn't seem to want to elaborate, though, at least not on her own.

"Why?" he asked, "I mean. It's just some movie."

"I think you already know why," she replied, nudging him with her elbow. "Why did you play those video games with Ranma? You had to know he'd beat you, since he has more experience with them. And it must have taken up time you'd rather have spent working."

Ryouga crossed his arms and frowned, as if to imply, 'why indeed?'

"Time is an investment, too, in both business and friendships," Nabiki said, and far more succinctly and accurately than he'd have been capable of himself. "And we are your friends, Ryouga-kun. So waste some time with us, ok?"

"I suppose I did promise to go…" he rationalized, somewhat dubiously. "By not saying I wouldn't…"

"Besides," she said, still smiling despite his intransigence. "You may have a good time!"

He remembered the last get together type party he had been to: the infamous Tendo Christmas Party. No **huge** brawls had broken out, gods knew why, given that Kasumi had invited every dojo destroyer, rival, insane fiancé, and enemy of the Tendo dojo to attend 'in good faith.' He had done his fair share of work setting the party up at the time, and he had hoped to present Akane with a gift that would win her heart… or at least her attention up through dinner. But she had been too involved in heading off Nabiki's scheme to sell off 'date time' with Ranma to Ukyou, Shampoo and Kodachi. The pain of her walking right past him, his present in his outstretched hands, still lingered deep in his heart like a drop of poison.

But things were different now, weren't they?

"Maybe," he conceded.

* * *

**Sanctuary Community 004**

Sectoids did not think of themselves as individuals, so there were no names between them when they met. Their thoughts alone distinguished them from one another. This was their natural state of being, and even in their new human forms, they remained true to it. There were six of them in all, and all had been born and bred for the mission at hand.

Four of those six sat together at a human 'commissary' where food was distributed. Their training had made them aware of such places, and that they were often used for human social gatherings. It was logical to have their gathering in the same place, as humans tended to, and put on some semblance of desiring physical proximity and companionship.

In their human forms, two male and two female, they all looked alike: pale skin, rather expressionless faces, and white hair. The features were highly unusual among the human population, but it was believed that they would blend in with the exotic Amazons and Phoenix people they had been captured with. And even if they failed, there were two other Sectoids who had been given body-specific curses, and who looked entirely like normal humans (unfortunately, using those cursed springs more than once would have produced more suspicious 'twins').

All in all, things had gone very well so far.

All six retained a mental connection to The Mind even in their human forms, though the link was less regular and reliable than they had expected. This had borne fruit in the first phase of the plan: crippling the human interceptor and allowing the Battleship to escape from the terror site. After that, their forged identities as natives and "victims" of the awful alien attack had been accepted – there were hardly any remaining Amazons or local humans left alive to make a lack of relatives look suspicious, or to cast aspersions on their identity.

As expected, the humans had used mind probes on everyone who had survived the site, but had not bothered to test them for Jyusenkyou curses. This was just as well for them, however, as all four had a backup mission incase infiltration proved impossible. Implanted inside each of their bodies was a biological micro explosive and a sample of the aerosolized Chryssalid Venom. Even without calling for direct backup, they could each effectively infect anyone in a forty meter radius.

"This body requires additional nourishment." One of the two females thought-projected to the others, as they sat around a human table, made of some sort of recycled plant material and petrochemicals. 'She' was one of the two group medics. "We should ingest."

"I believe I require carbohydrates in particular." A male, one of two assigned engineers, mentally responded. "Which of these items has that nutritional supplement?"

"I do not know with certainty." The first thought out loud. "I believe the item that is third from the top on this list is high in starch."

Another female in the group leaned forward on the table and spoke, using vocalizations, in a low tone. "We appear suspicious if we do not talk openly."

That one had been the second in command: a soldier class Sectoid.

"Unless it is a secure matter, use your mouths to express it," she then added, but in thought.

"That is prudent," the other male said slowly, and licked his lips profusely. The use of speech words came more easily to some than others.

"Yes. Let us discuss arrangements to eat foodstuffs…" the other male engineer said, and looked from side to side suspiciously. No one else in the building seemed to give them any notice. It was a strange collection of humans present with them in the commissary: some of the resettled Phoenix Tribes people, some of the near-Amazon locals, and a few rather generic looking others. A lot of them wore the same clothes. Most sat in silence. A radio played the same few songs in a recycled loop.

While they (tried) to talk about what to ingest, their thought conversation continued.

"My connection with the Mind is growing irregular." The female medic noted with dissatisfaction. "This problem must be corrected immediately."

"We must identify the root of the problem before we may solve it."

"Agreed."

"Yes."

"We have heard much of the human psionic jamming technology." One of the engineers replied. "Such a device must be located nearby. In one of the other settlements."

"What can be done about it?"

"Nothing at present."

"Unfortunate."

"Unacceptable."

"An erratic connection with the Mind will have to be endured for so long as this mission lasts, or we self terminate." The soldier interrupted, putting an end to the complaints. The Sanctuary community was divided into a grid with nine separate blocs. They were currently in 1A bloc, and if there was a jamming device, it was probably in 2B. The humans had soldiers preventing movement between the blocs.

"Accepted."

"Yes."

"Understood."

"I would speculate that our mission will be over soon." One of the male engineers thought quickly.

"Elaborate." The anxious female medic queried.

"Our estimates on the population of this complex indicate a minimum of sixty family units, and over one hundred and fifty individuals. We have identified a major settlement. There is no additional technical data to collect."

"You speculate with accuracy." The female soldier agreed. "We must be ready for when confirmation comes. It is expected that several will be required to self terminate to create confusion. We must identify strategic locations."

"Agreed."

"Yes."

"Understood."

Silently sitting by themselves the four aliens-turned-humans stared at their menus. They had been doing so for quite some time without interruption. The aliens, however, failed to notice that. Neither did they find the rather exotic and unusual fare in the menu to be out of place, including such casual and commonplace diner fare as: steamed duck bill, tsampa, boiled pig's feet, goat tartar, momos, and the always popular yak flavored ramen. Having been raised on a liquid nutrient soup since incubation and being trained more to pass for human and hide their identities from mental probes than to understand human foods, the aliens' lack of interest or attention could hardly be seen as unusual.

Besides: everything was going so well.

* * *

Obscured by shadows and wafting incense, a single figure sat prostrate on the ground, legs crossed in a meditative pose and hands clasped together. Faint lines could be seen running along the ground, glowing faintly in the darkness. The figure remained, unmoving, like a statue frozen in place. However, this apparent statue breathed, slowly but rhythmically.

"Yak flavored ramen?" a voice asked amid the shadows.

The figure's eyes never opened, but one eyebrow did twitch in silent annoyance.

* * *

As the credits slowly scrolled down the projection screen, the dojo erupted into chatter and conversation. Kasumi hung out near the back close to where Ranma and Akane had set up a table with drinks and bowls of snacks. More people had attended than anyone had expected, responding to the notification email that had been mailed out to the base wide server. For many, they were just re-watching an old favorite, and for a few others, it was the first American movie they had seen and understood entirely in English.

What amazed Kasumi the most was that nothing had gone wrong, even from the get go. Ranma and Akane seemed to be getting along well enough to organize the whole thing, and as if those two being cordial with each other weren't surprising enough, there had been no fighting over seats or food or anything. Mousse and Shampoo had attended, but kept mostly to themselves and their fellow martial arts comrades. Ukyou had made a point to mingle with everyone, instead of trying to hang off of Ranma's arm. Ryu and Konatsu hung out between the snacks and the crowd, occasionally fiddling with the computer that had been set up to play music (and the movie). Even Kuno refrained from any particularly annoying behavior, and it was rather amusing to see no fewer than two girls (neither of which Kasumi had even seen before) fawning over the handsome kendoist.

For someone who had, with no small amount of pride, considered herself a calm in the storm that was the Nerima… it really was a shocking sight to see. And in a way, it was a humbling one, too. Kasumi had always tried to take the chaos in stride and to provide a stable foundation for her siblings and family, but somehow, over the last couple weeks, so much had changed between them. They could get along by themselves, between themselves. She had known that India Squad meshed well together after only a short time, but she'd never really imagined that the girls of Juliet Squad could be around each other for more than a few minutes without a fight.

If, a year ago, Ranma and Akane had tried something like this, how would it have turned out? It made her feel both happy and, in a guilty way, sort of sad, too. If she wasn't needed to provide that calm foundation to a gathering of these super human, yet still teenage and often immature, martial artists… then what could she do? What could she contribute? What would her life be like when no one really needed her anymore?

It was a hard question to consider, even in private, much less answer.

She had come to the get together for two reasons, and both had gone unaddressed. She hadn't needed to interrupt in any potentially explosive arguments, and when Ryouga finally arrived, likewise surprised by the general good cheer present, Kasumi hadn't had it in her to ruin the mood by trying to talk to him about his training. It was still a talk she felt they, _he_, needed to have in the interests of his physical welfare and emotional well being, but it would have to be another time and place.

"Braveheart. Total classic!" Sitting next to her, Doctor Roane softly clapped his hands. "And the ending? Perfect! What do you think…?"

He turned to stare at her, and immediately he noticed the look on her face. "Hey, Kasumi? What's wrong?"

She smiled at him to assuage his concern. "Oh! Nothing. I… I guess I'm just happy nothing went wrong today. Seeing everyone together like this…"

"They're interesting kids," Roane agreed, at least in a general way. "Hell, listen to me. They're my little brother's age. But still…" he trailed off, and smiled in that amiable way that reminded her of Dr. Tofu, on the rare occasions he wasn't acting totally goofy. It was the sort of smile that only encouraged others to reply in kind.

Instead of continuing what he had been about to say, he asked, "Are you going to talk to Special Lieutenant Hibiki?"

"It will have to be another time," Kasumi replied, and bowed to him politely. "Thank you again for your help."

"Yes, well… he's pretty determined," Roane said, with a little hesitation. "So don't get discouraged…"

Kasumi could remember clearly how the lost boy had broken down in front of her, his mental instability growing after the encounter with his father. She had been able to use a sympathetic pressure point to help him, but she could still feel a shade of the dark depressive energy lingering inside her normally tranquil aura. More than the depression, though, there had been an iron clad, almost suicidal, determination.

"You should also consider, Kasumi, that he and the others seem to be growing in psionic power every day," Doctor Roane observed, but spoke quietly so only she could hear. "Sometimes you just have to trust in the other person and respect their motivations. Even if you disagree with them."

He was right, and a part of her had always thought the same way.

"I know," she replied softly. "But I can't see someone in pain and do nothing. I can't."

He nodded slowly and held out his hand. Not for the first time, she could see the gold wedding ring on his finger. To him, offering his hand had probably just been a casual offer of comfort and friendship. But from her traditional and proper Japanese perspective, it was a bold gesture... still, as Kasumi daily reminded herself, they weren't in Tokyo anymore. With a sudden jolt, she also realized that she well and truly wanted a good friend of her own, someone she had that her sisters and peers did not. An older man: someone wise, experienced, respectable, someone like Doctor Tofu. She wanted that friendship again.

So she met boldness with boldness, and she took it.

* * *

Cologne draped the titian mantle and cloak over her body, letting out a sensual sigh as the alien fabric rippled and fell over her body. She had decided to try out her new attire in the nude, to fully appreciate it. The aliens themselves had basically no fashion sense: the robes were functional, in that they were protective and effective at dissipating directed energy. Contrasted with the warm and humid atmosphere in the alien base, the fabric felt cool and clingy against her bare skin, like a thousand chilly fingers. This… this... was what she had been waiting for. The aliens, and one alien in particular, had promised her an undying place among the stars, a place determined solely by the power at her command.

THOSE ARE NOT FOR YOU

She ignored the psionic chastisement, preferring to run her hands sensually up and over her body, reveling in the feel of Ethereal fabric on human flesh. It felt so… right. How could she have ever refused Hollow Eyes? Yes, that Cologne truly had been a Queen of Fools.

REPLY SUBMIT

That spike of mental energy did finally ruin her good mood.

REPLY

SUBMIT

She turned slowly. In the all consuming darkness of the alien base, another Ethereal hovered in midair. Like all of its kind, it held itself suspended in midair with the power of its mind. It did this virtually from the moment it left the birthing tank to the instant it died. It did not need to breathe. It thought – therefore it was. It was truly beautiful, but at the same time, this particular one was getting annoying.

**SUBMIT**

She flinched at the mental roar, but instead of reply, she took a few steps towards the creature. This close, she could see the misshapen face. This one had two plates of white-yellow bone sticking out from its cheeks, and an irregular mouth full of similarly colored teeth. It would never need them, never use its jaw, so they were entirely cosmetic in their repulsiveness.

SUBMIT

It tried again as she grew closer.

Cologne just walked past, ignoring it completely.

SUBMIT

YOU MUST SUBMIT

YOU ARE HUMAN YOU MUST SUBMIT

Anger welled up between the cracks in its cold and calculating alien mind, but it was an impotent and fleeting emotion. Power defined one's place in the hierarchy of The Mind… and this one was strong. That was simply how things were. Unable to force the compulsion, the Ethereal could only float in place and watch as Cologne walked off, titian robes swaying about her bare ankles as she laughed.


	70. Once Upon a Time in China I

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. The UNETCO timetable moves ever forward, but a new complication has arisen as the alien forces in the Far East surge out in unexpected numbers and with surprising fury. After the grueling Operation Winter Triangle, and the resulting assault on the Sirius Conspiracy, the two squads take a few moments of rest between missions. While Shampoo and Mousse take a moment to seek out the exiled Amazon Perfume, Cologne finds her talents put to good use aiding the alien cause.

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia**

Chapter XXIV

_Once Upon a Time in __China_

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

**China****, 1864**

The valley shook with the sound of bells, heralding their return. Among the outlying villages, curious townspeople and eager guards came out to line the road and watch as they limped back home. They were a long awaited band, small but blood-soaked, away from tribal lands for several years. Their armor was well polished, but clearly bore the abuse of many battles; their colorful clothes were mended and uncouth, with off color patches and stitches holding it all together. Borne on their backs and amid their other Spartan luggage were weapons, both their own, and those collected as battlefield trophies.

Cologne walked with the aid of a staff at the head of her company. Her left leg still stung, but she could feel that it would recover fully in time. It would likely have healed already, had she not needed to walk halfway across China. Now, finally, they were almost home. Along the road she could see other Amazons: women assigned to garrison and protect the outlying towns and villages. Some were her age; all stared at her with wide eyes. None of those women spoke, though the other villagers felt free to quietly mutter amongst themselves.

Soon the weary cadre left the village behind, and entered a flat expanse of rice patties encapsulated within a ring of mist covered mountains. An excited murmur rose up among the other women, and one even had to reign in her horse. They could almost see the watch towers that radiated outward from the hidden Amazon village itself. The misty haze seemed to grow thicker as they approached, and then she could see shapes standing on both sides of the path.

Warrior women in full battle kit lined the road, saluting as the tired band of sisters slowly walked past. The village itself was just up ahead. There were no walls, not even a ditch or a palisade. What there was, was pair of foreign-looking columns at each of the village's four cardinal points. These had been erected in ancient times, marking the beginning and the end of the village's formal limits. Standing now between two of those pillars were the five Council Elders, including the Matriarch herself.

Cologne stopped several body lengths' from the Elders, straightened out her back, and barked over her shoulder, "Present! Respectfully!"

Her sisters quickly straightened out their posture, formed tight lines behind her, and held their weapons at attention. Only the truly badly wounded were exempt. The four who still had their horses pulled them over to the side of the road, and quickly combed down the animal's hair and coats to make sure they were in presentable condition. Cologne quickly straightened out her greaves, and put her helmet back on; though doing so aggravated the bandaged wound on her head.

Finally content with her appearance before the Elders, Cologne saluted them with a loud "HOA!" which was quickly followed by her subordinates behind her. The Elders gave no response, but Cologne pressed on regardless.

"I, Khu Lon, speak for these soldiers of the Amazons. We have returned victorious, and are humbly requesting permission to disband the First Companion Company and enter the village!"

The five old women still barred the path, but they were smiling in approval. After a few seconds, the Matriarch, the honored Elder Sa Lon, responded.

"Where is Xai Vu?" she asked, though her tone implied she already knew.

"Fallen in battle, Elder," Cologne answered, but held her head high. "Her killer was a Taiping assassin. I avenged her death and assumed command of the Company."

Salon sighed, but slowly nodded her head. "Very well. You may disband and enter the village. We, the Council, would hear what news you bring in private."

"Yes, honored Elders," Cologne said and bowed her head in humility. The five withered crones that ran the Amazon village turned and slowly walked back to the Council Chambers, leaving the road to the town open. Cologne waited for them to leave before turning around and facing her sisters. They had been through much together since that day, more than four years ago, when she had joined the expedition called by the Elders to fight the Taiping. She had only been a girl then: a thirteen year old prodigy eager to prove herself in battle.

"The Elders have accepted our request to disband!" She announced to all the survivors of the First Companions. "Let none say we did not do our duty or abide by our laws in battle! In victory, we bring honor to the village. In honoring the village, we honor ourselves. First Companion Company: DISBAND!"

A hearty cheer rose up from the weary woman warriors as they saluted their Commander for the last time. Once back inside the village, they would be forbidden from doing so. From that moment on, all honors would be reserved for the Council of Elders. There would be, could be, no secondary displays of loyalty. This was Law. This had been Law for generations uncounted, all the way back to the beginning. Unofficially, though, a returning Commander who had found victory on the battlefield could count herself as far more popular and keen to be eventually admitted to the Council than an Amazon with more mundane accomplishments under her name.

One day, that would be her.

From the very beginning, she had been raised with the expectation that she would become an Elder on the Council. No other child her age had anything near her level of skill. None could match her intuitive understanding of the Art. By eleven, she had learned all her mother's techniques. By thirteen, she had nearly completed her tutelage under her grandmother. Now, at the age of eighteen, she was a living hero of the Taiping War, with an ever greater mastery of the martial arts. The only thing she lacked was land, but her personal wealth could be expanded in time as she built up a network of supporters. She was already stronger than her mother and older sister; perhaps the time was ripe for her to press her inheritance claims more strongly and demand a better share of her grandmother's holdings?

She waited by the pillars, speaking briefly to each of the older women she had served with as they entered the village. She knew all their names, and thanked them in turn for their service. For those who had stood out in battle, she briefly reminded them that their exploits would be recorded and remembered. Their Company would be disbanded, but they would always be a band of sisters. Cologne knew she could count on their material and spiritual support in the years to come. When the last one bowed and entered the village, Cologne sighed softly and did the same.

Knowing she had taken a little more time than was expected, she hastily made her way to the Council Chambers. The building itself had remained much the same for many centuries, only slightly redesigned after being leveled in an earthquake some two centuries previous: it was a cloistered rectangular structure with an ancient colonnade around it, directly adjacent to the Speaking Forum. Surrounding the forum and flanking the Chambers were statues of great heroines of the tribe, most from ancient times. No new statue had been erected in four hundred years. As ambitious as she was, even Cologne didn't expect she would ever have one of her made.

There were no guards.

The Elders, of course, had no need of lesser warriors to defend them or carry out their wills. The Five maintained a monopoly on the most powerful Amazon techniques, and especially sealing and binding techniques. They could bind a door better than any guard and control the village through sheer force of will. Cologne paused at the wooden inner doors that led to the Sanctum of the Elders, and a moment later they opened of their own accord. This was a circular room within the rectangular super structure, with an elevated ring. On the elevated ring sat the five Elders. A faint light from small oil lamps lit the chamber in a faint glow, just enough for Cologne to see the murals on the domed ceiling.

Her nose twitched; she could smell some of the tobacco smoke that had become popular among village Elders. She subtly scanned the upper ring, looking for the Persian _ghalyun_ or Indian _huqqa_ responsible. She was not personally keen on such western or "near eastern" indulgences. Her time in East China had driven home the sort of debauchery caused by intoxication of that sort. The water pipe eluded her, however, and she quickly dismissed its non-appearance. The Elders had probably hidden it away somewhere. She focused instead on the five old women looking down at her.

Cologne carefully got on her knees and kowtowed deeply. "How may I serve, honored Council?"

"You may serve," one of the Elders hissed. "By telling us what concessions we have won from that Manchu whore."

"The Western Empress Dowager has agreed to all our demands," Cologne replied, not yet raising her head far from the floor. "Furthermore, she has expressed gratitude and admiration for all the assistance we have extended to her and to the Chinese people…"

There were more than a few derisive laughs at that comment. While none of the Elders present could exactly claim any sort of kinship with the previous Ming Dynasty, the Qing were still roundly despised. Or at least the fact was that those who disliked the Qing were more vocal about it. Still, the ailing Manchus had been willing to make some interesting concessions and payments in return for Amazon aid that, normally, would never have been forthcoming.

Cologne went on to describe some of the baggage the First Companions had brought with them: payment from the Empress for the Council of Elders. She then described the land concessions that the Elders could expect, and she listened as The Five discussed how to divvy up the spoils. Cologne spoke up only to speak for her former Companions, and to press their own claims to some of the new land.

"You have done well, granddaughter," the Matriarch slowly warbled, as the meeting droned on towards a mundane finish. "We are happy to see you return in triumph."

Cologne, by this point standing, still kept he head respectfully bowed. "I look forward to seeing my mother and sister, grandmother."

"I am sorry to tell you this…" Salon went on to tell her anyway. "Your mother has passed away."

"What?" Cologne gasped, looking up at her ancient maternal grandmother. "How?!"

"A sleeping sickness came upon her suddenly," Salon explained. "This was two years ago, Khu Lon."

Cologne slowly shook her head. "I… I can't believe she's…" Then she realized something. "And my sister?"

"She has taken your mother's place in our community," Salon said, with little emotion. "The two of you have much to speak of…"

Cologne's eyes narrowed. Her older sister, Salon the Younger, named after her Matriarch grandmother, had taken her mother's place? That meant she had already claimed the family inheritance. Cologne had always been her mother's favorite. Had she lived…

"However," Salon the Elder added. "I would ask that you settle your affairs in the village quickly. Once you are healed, we have another task for you… our most capable young Amazon."

"Another task?" Cologne blurted out, surprised. She had just come back home after four years of fighting for the village! In the upper ring, one of the other elders cackled at her reaction.

"Yes…" Salon hissed. "You see, this is a task for which you are uniquely prepared. We wish you to find your father."

Still reeling from hearing that her mother had died, she could only ask, "What? My father? …Why?"

Amid the smoke, Salon's withered face creased up in a cunning smile.

* * *

_Cologne_

Slowly, Cologne opened her eyes. _Doctor?_

_It is time. Come to me._

_Give me a moment._

She sat alone amid a tangle of alien plants, naked and less than pleased with her progress. Since coming to the base, she had adopted the gardens as a place to focus her mind. Most of the underground alien facility was mile after mile of stark metal walls and technology. It created an unwelcome mental dissonance being surrounded by a material that did not properly conform to that she had trained with. She was a master of the five elemental sympathies: earth, metal, fire, wood and water. The alien metal, however, was something of an anomaly. It threw off her balance.

The alien gardens were far more accommodating. The life forms there were different, but similar enough that she could feel her _ki_ extending into them and her awareness expanding. It would take longer to feel as comfortable among the sterile and unsympathetic exotic alloys the aliens to loved to use. None of her new companions seemed to have the same problem. Tofu's martial arts were entirely internalized, so he didn't seek elemental sympathy in any of its forms. Rouge's power was also internal, and Ayabe's martial arts were exotic and mostly self contained.

Standing up, Cologne draped the titian cloak she had procured over her shoulders. It, and her mental power, marked her as an Ethereal in all but genes. Inside her head, she could feel the ever present sensation of the Mind: like a second set of ears and eyes. Occasionally, it could be incessant, taking the form of an all consuming Voice, but that voice was an illusion. It was merely the collective will of individual aliens, filtered and magnified through The Mind. The Mind itself was a quiet thing, waiting at the periphery of thought, there to offer necessary information and insight. It was a helper not a commander, and it was patient and comforting. It linked them all together and made many into one.

As she walked, bare footed, out of the neatly arranged and immaculately maintained alien garden, she passed by her alien brothers and sisters: Sectoids and Mutons, mostly, though there were a few Snakemen and Floaters still on the base. They silently acknowledged her superiority as they crossed paths. The Ethereals were less keen to do so, and she'd been hit with more SUBMIT compulsions over the last 24 hours than she'd ever imagined. She just brushed them off. It left her exact position in the hierarchy somewhat vague, which was fine by her. She wasn't planning on ordering anyone around, and she didn't want to pick a spot that would provoke challenges.

She would be leaving for Mars in a month or so anyway, so there was little point to getting into squabbles. Before that, though, she had some important business to attend to. First and foremost was her work with the Doctor, work that her benefactor, Hollow Eyes, expected to see bear fruit. Then, of course, there were her boys… ah, but that was for later. Work came before pleasure, after all.

A pair of seamless doors slid open before her, the metal melting into the walls. Beyond was a large vault lit up by the glow of a hundred cylindrical tubes, lining the walls on two levels. A light grey Sectoid brushed past her as he left, but Cologne could see several of them near a figure in robes much like her own. Turning at her entrance, Tofu stared at her with atrophied eyes and motioned her over.

_Come,_ he thought to her. _Today should be interesting._

_That's one way of putting it,_ Cologne thought back.

_Something wrong? Is it about that special request you made?_

_No. Not that. It's… just that it's been a while since I had to lecture to neophytes_, she replied, one hand on her hips as she watched Sectoids start to open some of the maturation chambers. _I do hope you boys grew me some quick learners._

_No need to treat them gently, __Cologne__…_ Tofu smiled; pale white teeth behind bloodless lips. _Even if this batch isn't up to the task, I'm sure we'll have the process down by the third or fourth iteration…_

* * *

**McCarran****International****Airport**

**Las Vegas, ****Nevada**

Shampoo and Mousse entered the non-descript white van. They had been ushered from landing through customs with the utmost speed, a good thing given their time table. It had not been easy convincing Lieutenant Command Yasuda to sign off on the trip. There was still a lot of work to do in the Far East theatre, not the least of which was the planned assault on Alien Base 019. A new Avenger fighter-interceptor had just arrived at Seiran from the manufacturing facility in Fry Canyon, and while delayed, UNETCO was still committed to wiping out the alien presence on Earth before Christmas.

So there was a bit of a rush to their mission here in the States.

In the van, they met their contact: a dark haired man from the FBI. He was told that they were from Homeland Security, but once in the car, he strongly implied that he knew who they really reported to. There wasn't much UFO activity in the States anymore, not since the Big Push of 2003, but the Western U.S. used to be a real hotbed. Working as one of UNETCO's FBI contacts, he had probably seen his share of otherworldly stuff.

"Thing's have been pretty quiet around here lately," he said, his English twanged by a slightly colloquial California accent. "I hope this isn't anything too serious like that mess out East."

"What mess out East?" Mousse slyly asked.

The FBI man chuckled. "Forget I asked."

He'd already taken care of pretty much everything they'd asked before they flew over. There were wire taps, some initial surveillance, and a background search. It was quick and thorough work given so little advance notice. In fact, there was more information, especially regarding personal contacts, phone calls, and credit history, than either of the two Amazons had expected.

Mousse examined a satellite photo, squinting behind his glasses.

"Are you sure this is her?" he asked.

"Quite sure," the FBI man confidently replied.

"This…" Shampoo spoke up, speaking slowly. "I can't believe this is her."

"How do you want to handle this?" Mousse asked, putting the photo down on his lap. "Maybe we should watch and wait a little longer…?"

"No," Shampoo said, cutting him off. She pointed to the building in the satellite photograph. "Take us here or drop us off nearby. We're here to talk to her, not play 'Bond James Bond.'"

Their FBI contact spared her a disbelieving look. 'Bond James Bond?'

Stealthily, Mousse leaned over and whispered in Shampoo's ear.

"What?!" She grabbed him by his shirt, eyes wide. "Really?" The girl then hid her face in her hands. "No wonder that spatula freak laughed when I said it!"

"Yes, well…" Mousse quickly straightened out his shirt and tie.

Special Agent Penbar felt an uncharacteristic sweat drop roll down his forehead. 'Ok: definitely not the kind of people I thought I'd meet on this op… Just what do these two 'Specialists' specialize in, anyway?'

* * *

Mousse and Shampoo left the van behind some distance from the house itself, making their way there on foot. It was a bright, brisk afternoon, and by all appearances the two Amazons were well dressed foreigners visiting the US for one of the many business or professional conventions held at Las Vegas hotels and casinos. The neighborhood around them was mundane, but quite nice in a stereotypical American suburban way. Large two-story houses in slightly different styles ran along the road, all with generous and well irrigated front lawns and well manicured trees and hedgerows. 

"Are you sure she knows we are coming?" Shampoo asked in Mandarin, breaking the silence they had maintained since leaving the FBI van.

"Pretty sure," Mousse replied, pushing up his glasses and watching as a child on a bike rode by on the opposite side of the street. He turned back to Shampoo. "As I said, I never met her or even spoke to her in person before."

"Exactly why we needed to make sure she didn't attempt to flee…" Shampoo referred to the work of their FBI friend. They had requested the agency keep an eye on this person in case she tried to leave or otherwise attempt something suspicious, as well as to confirm that she was who the two Amazons believed her to be.

"Would you blame her if she did?" Mousse asked, "Especially after what happened back at the village."

Shampoo frowned, but didn't argue. She had always thought of Perfume as a traitor, and an enemy of the Amazons. She had broken village laws that even a rebellious male like Mousse would not have dared to flout. It was no surprise that she had suffered for it. Shampoo still found it hard to sympathize, the Law being the Law, after all, but it was hardly surprising that Mousse felt just the opposite: that Perfume had been wronged by the village, by the Elders, and unjustly exiled.

Mousse himself would probably have been exiled, had he been female. As it was, there was no real precedent for a male facing exile just for learning to fight. Mousse had never once spoken out against the Council, never once turned against the women of the tribe, and never made an effort to be anything worse than an amorous nuisance. Still, he had ran in bad circles in the past. He consorted with the Exiled. Apparently they had helped him when he first left the village.

Shampoo glanced at her companion, silently contemplating just how he had convinced those exiles to help him. It was possible they had helped the male out of a desire to spite the village itself, or maybe they had retained their sympathies for the male gender despite being punished… Mousse had explained only some of it, keeping most of the details in confidence. He had explained that Perfume, the most notorious exile of the last half century, had assumed something of a ring leader status among the outcast community. The thought of meeting with her still stung Shampoo's Amazon pride, and her long engrained training to follow, respect, and adhere to the village Laws.

"This is it," Mousse said, as they approached a dark green mailbox with the numbers 104 decaled on the side. The house in question was of a colonial style, flanked by trees sporting bright red and orange leaves. Here on the ground, it looked quite different than the stale top down photographs taken by satellite. It looked like someone's home. Shampoo and Mousse took a moment to check to make sure it was the right address before walking up the slight slope of the driveway.

Mousse caught a falling leaf in his hand, and looked down at it while they walked. "Strange, isn't it?"

"What is?" Shampoo asked, knowing he couldn't mean the leaf, though it was a bright red unseen in their part of rural China during the fall season.

"Someone like her, ending up in a place like this…" He dropped the leaf. "Even with her true powers sealed, Perfume is still around Elder level in ability: she is still a master martial artist almost without equal. Where would one of us be, if what had happened to her happened to us?"

Shampoo sighed; unhappy being presented with that sort of question. "Perfume was always taken by western ways… she should never have been allowed to leave the village. Then she never would have strayed or broken the law."

"The law should never have tried to keep her from leaving," Mousse replied.

"Let's not have this argument again…" She glared at him. "You never used to be this… assertive before. It's annoying."

"Yeah, well, I'm getting used to not being hit when I speak my mind," he countered, voice calm, even mirthful. Shampoo stared at him, still surprised by his newfound brazenness. She knew the cause: Mousse's new male Japanese peers, all of which were typically arrogant outsider males. She had noticed it on missions, too. Mousse wasn't the strongest of the males, but he was growing far too comfortable mingling with them. He was becoming an outsider himself; even moreso than before. It didn't help that Shampoo's great grandmother wasn't around to keep him in line, and that he seemed to care less and less exactly what Shampoo herself thought of him.

It was exactly why she had chosen him to be an equal, and an Elder, in the new Amazon village she intended to rebuild. The exiles would never accept her dominating a three person council through a cat's paw. Mousse had grown annoyingly outspoken and confident enough that she could count on him to stand up for both his principles and her interests, so long as they did not conflict.

A young woman answered the door: she was Asian American, mixed Caucasian and Chinese, but with pale violet colored eyes. The unusual coloration was a dead giveaway of her parentage. The young woman stared at the two Amazons for a few seconds, as if searching her memory to try and remember if these were people she had met before. She must not have known many men and women a few years her senior, as she quickly realized they weren't here to see her. From behind the house, a dog began to bark.

"You here about my mom or my brother?" she asked, curtly.

"Your mother, please," Mousse replied, switching back to perfect English. The girl smiled at him ('a little too amiably,' Shampoo mentally noted) and motioned them inside.

"She's out back," the young woman said, holding open the door.

"Shoes?" Mousse then asked, as he entered.

"Are they dirty?"

"I don't think so."

"Then leave 'em on. No big."

Shampoo watched the back and forth quietly, observing the girl's mannerisms. Her clothes were… American. A white top with some sort of logo on it, and jeans - nothing amazon-like at all – even her hair was cut short, an unheard of taboo for anyone but the lowest ranked Amazon. There was nothing in the girl's poise or posture that could lead anyone to assume that she had any more skill in the Art than the average action movie fan. She was naturally pretty, as most Amazons tended to be, but that was all. Shampoo had expected one or both of Perfume's children to be trained in the Art, at least to Perfume's old level. It was commonly believed that the Exile's children were trained to avenge their parents and that true Amazons had to be on their toes to overcome their vengeful cousins.

"You two must be from the village, right?"

The question came as a shock.

"W… what?" Shampoo blurted out. "How do you know…?"

"You look the type," the girl said with a shrug. "Though you're much younger than the others. And I've never seen a guy from the village before."

"How much do you know about your mother's village?" Mousse carefully asked as the girl led them through the house. It was nice on the inside, with tile floors and richly furnished rooms and paintings and pictures on the walls. An unusual rug hung on a wall, and Mousse stared at the patterns in it.

"Only a little," she replied, unfazed by the question. "That's a Navaho rug, by the way. Nice, huh?"

"Quite."

"I'm Amy, by the way," she introduced herself, looking at them over her shoulder. "I guess you two have weird names, like Conditioner or Shower or something?"

"Shan Pu," Shampoo said, mustering her pride.

"Mu Tzu," Mousse said with a bit of a flourish. "But I'm named after the dessert, not the hair product."

Amy laughed at that, and so did Mousse, though Shampoo couldn't quite see how making fun of Amazon names was anything but insulting. Their names weren't any stranger than "Mint" or "Saffron." It was all just a coincidence that they ended up meaning strange things in English. A very strange coincidence, but a coincidence nonetheless.

"You shouldn't give the wrong idea," Shampoo whispered to Mousse in Chinese.

"I'm not," he replied in English.

Amy glanced at them again, but didn't interrupt. Soon they were at the back door leading to the porch, led there through a large family room with an impressive television. The source of the barking could be seen behind the door: a large Labrador retriever, tail wagging excitedly. Amy slipped through the door to restrain the dog, and behind her, Mousse and Shampoo could see someone ascending the porch steps from the back yard. She was an older woman in pale yellow and white clothes, with a lap top computer in one hand. Like the girl, Amy, she had pale violet eyes and blue-black hair.

She was also quite clearly pregnant.

"You must be Mousse," she said, eyes quickly appraising her new guests. "You've certainly grown up… but who's your friend? Ah! That aura… you're one of Cologne's girls."

'She can read that without Fighting Intent?' Shampoo thought in amazement, feeling excitement well up within her. Normally a battle aura needed to manifest for it to be observed from a distance in any meaningful fashion. Next to her, Mousse bowed his head respectfully.

"Perfume," he said, respectfully.

"I am Shan Pu, student and great grand daughter of the former Matriarch Khu Lon," Shampoo replied, and saw the interest in Perfume's eyes.

"_Former_ Matriarch?" the older woman asked, and gracefully put her laptop down on a nearby glass patio table. "Aright… let's talk."


	71. Once Upon a Time in China II

"Teach me!"

"…"

Cologne seethed, mentally vacillating between simply getting angrier or debasing herself by trying to be more diplomatic. The latter had not been exactly her specialty over the years, and the former didn't seem to be getting anywhere. It had not been a terribly long or difficult task, finding her father, but it had been a diversion that further weakened her position in the village. She had no doubt now that the Elders had sent her away to blunt her popularity, and it left her older and weaker sister free to continue owning the land Cologne had hoped to inherit. Now, to pile trouble upon trouble, she was met with unyielding intransigence.

"Why won't you just tell me what I need to know?" She asked, tempering her hot head and biting her tongue. "Then I can leave and you'll have peace and quiet again."

"…"

Her father, as he always had before in every attempt she had made with him, said nothing. Instead he sat, mute, facing the temple's great bronze Buddha. He wore the clothes of a common monk, but they were a deep black and worn from years of wear and damage. He was a fallen priest worshipping alone in an abandoned shrine in the middle of the wilderness. He was also a massive human being, well over six feet tall from his bare feet to his shaved head – his chest was as broad as most men's shoulders, and his heavily muscled arms were probably heavier than her legs.

He sat with his back to her, unconcerned by her words, her pleas, or her threats of Amazon retribution. She was in half a mind to still try and beat the information out of him, but she couldn't tell, couldn't read from his aura or posture, whether he would simply sit there and take the abuse, or whether he would strike back. The Elders had confirmed her mother's description of him: he was a heretical monk, devoted to developing forbidden techniques in the pursuit of his faith.

After a while, just like all the times before, she grew tired of trying to talk to him and instead she fell against one of the walls and waited. Which was pretty much all she had been doing since she came to the weathered temple, almost a month ago. It had been only two months since she had returned to the village, and now she was committed to probably wasting another year or more sitting around and waiting for her cursed father to divulge the secrets demanded by the Amazon Council.

Vexingly, this man before her seemed to spend days at a time in a meditative position, though it was usually outside, and not in the one-room temple shrine. Often when he was in doors, he would bring an object with him, and he would contemplate it for hours on end. One time, he had studied an autumn flower in his hand, from the moment he picked it, to when it completely withered and crumpled, two days later. In all that time, he had not moved an inch.

He was, Cologne had determined, the exact opposite of her mother, who she remembered as hyperactive and always trying to busy herself in some affair or another. Of the five elements, her mother had been sensitive to fire and wind; her father was obviously earth or metal sensitive. It was probably the former, since she had been sent to retrieve forbidden techniques and not forbidden artifacts. There was very limited information, however, in exactly what the Council expected her to return with.

So she watched him, hoping to learn.

Calming down over the next few minutes, she lowered herself into a meditative pose of her own – an Amazon one – as she tried to feel out his aura and what he was doing. As always, she learned nothing from it, or from more casual observation. Hours passed, and she began to wonder if he would pull another "insider" or not when she felt a rumble… Opening her eyes, she saw her father slowly standing back up. Without saying a word, he craned his neck back and forth, right and left, working the kinks out of it. Turning around, she saw his face: plain and unremarkable, save for the shadows around his eyes and the jet black of his pupils.

Walking slowly past her, he stepped outside into the snow.

"Where are you going now?" she asked, suspecting he would give her a rare answer to this question at least. "To the waterfall again?"

Instead he nodded, denying her even that small human contact. She sighed. Whatever faith he clung to, it demanded a rigor and self depreciation that even the Amazons would consider half mad. He would spend the night, and perhaps all of the next day, sitting under a waterfall. At least he was heated by some small local hot springs, but otherwise it was still only fifty-fifty whether he would eat over the next 24 hours, and under the conditions outside getting wet would mean hypothermia… for most people.

But there was some hope: she knew from experience that after he spent time under the waterfall, he would eat, and then he would do what she considered light practice of some sort. That happened about once a week, and it was her best bet for at least learning what sorts of forbidden techniques he had that the Elders wanted. They had even talked a little at those times, though never about his techniques, a point of discussion that always ended any ongoing discussions.

It was during one of those talks that she had learned his name: "Ho."

Or so he said.

Stretching, she considered following him, but instead decided on a dip in the hot springs herself, after a workout of her own. She had seen some of the younger generation of Amazons back at the village, and there was little overly impressive to be seen in them. She was still the "great genius" of the Amazon village, the girl who had surpassed her already well respected mother at the age of twelve, and who had mastered her strong element by the age of thirteen. During the war, she had learned much from her sisters, and by now she could guess that she knew virtually every Amazon technique save those reserved for the Council itself, and those held as secrets within family lines. She truly was a genius, and she would still be one when she returned. And one day, she would not only be on the Council, but she would claim the title of Matriarch itself.

It was fate.

"Patience, Khu Lon. Patience…" she reminded herself, having taken to thinking aloud to fill the long days of silence. The thoughts of rising to glory, well deserved and well earned glory, filled her head as she practiced in the thinly falling snow. The hot springs here were small; most of the water in the area ended up swallowed by streams and babbling brooks, but they were quite beautiful, especially in the growing starkness of early winter. She practiced her forms beside the largest pool, and then took a short while to refresh her familiarity of the five elements. She was especially proud of that: even Elders never bothered to learn all five; instead they did as all great martial artists tended to, and specialized in one.

That specialization was both their greatest power and their greatest weakness. It was generally expected that Cologne would forsake the other four elements and concentrate on water, since it was her natural affinity. As she became more and more the master in that element, she would then be able to develop or refine the special techniques related to it. A generalist, on the other hand, would theoretically have a harder time developing new techniques. Cologne hoped to prove that old theory wrong.

As always, the water forms came easily, and her aura adapted to them effortlessly. Metal and Wood also came fairly easily, though they were generally considered the least practical of the five in battle. She mostly thought of Wood as useful only for its ability to heal the self and others, and Metal as useful only for the knowledge of artifacts and ancient treasures she had developed. Fire and Earth were harder to synchronize with; her natural affinity, water, destroyed Fire, and was in turn destroyed by Earth. These two powerful elements were problems she was determined to overcome, at least in time.

Finally satisfied that she was still at par with before she had been injured, Cologne relaxed her body, stripped down, and slipped into the hot waters that had so enticed her during her little work out. They were steaming hot, but very tranquil, and not bubbly at all. It was, perhaps, the one bright spot to the entire assignment.

Despite this, though, her thoughts drifted back to that same task, and to her father. Against her willingness to admit it, she had been somewhat exited by the chance to finally see him. Like many strong Amazon women, her father had been an outsider male who had been married into the Tribe thanks to the hard work of her mother. Cologne's father, however, had been a somewhat unique case, and he had been given special permission to leave the village again, supposedly with the promise that he would pass on any forbidden techniques he developed in his religious solitude.

Special techniques aside, Cologne had sort of hoped to find some kinship in the man. He was a strong outsider after all and not some pitiful Amazon male, so there was no shame in expecting something from him. By default he was strong enough to beat an Amazon in combat. Yet when Cologne had mentioned that her mother had passed away, her father hadn't even blinked. Instead, he had just nodded, slowly, and said, "I see."

Rotten, unsympathetic, uncooperative monk!

A rustle in the bushes nearby distracted her from her thoughts, and Cologne's eyes darted towards the disturbance. There were still a few animals in the area, and it wasn't unexpected that one or two would cautiously approach the hot spring, even if it was occupied at the moment. Besides, it if were a person, surely she'd have felt their aura… But despite the fact that her finely honed martial arts senses were telling her no one was around, her woman's intuition seemed to be unconvinced.

"Is someone there?" Covering herself with her arm she stood up to try and get a better look. Breaking off the tip of a small half frozen branch nearby, she narrowed her eyes at the offending and somewhat suspicious bush. Flicking her fingers, she let the twig fly – if it was a small animal, then it would add a little meat to her dinner over the next day or two. Stepping on the surface of the water and jumping off it, she landed just behind the bush intending to catch her wounded prey.

Instead, she saw the twig imbedded in a small log.

"What the…?" Carefully picking up the piece of firewood, she took another tentative look around. Maybe it had rolled down hill or something?

Drying off and returning to the shrine, she waited there until the next day, when her addled Buddhist heretic father returned from his waterfall meditations. To Cologne's surprise, another man followed close behind him. He was like her father's exact opposite: small, literally diminutive in size, with hardly any obvious muscle. Despite sounding quite young, his head of hair was already balding on the top, and he had a faint hint of a whisker like moustache on his upper lip.

"Father! Who is this?" She had inquired at the time, looking at the stranger with confusion. "He looks too small to deliver rice…"

To her surprise, the little troll man had looked up at her and winked.

"I'm no delivery boy, doll," he announced, and in rather bad Chinese no less. "The name's Happosai! But you can call me Happy."

* * *

Alien blood ran in rivulets around Cologne's feet. Stepping carefully around the gore, the alien-human hybrid once known as Doctor Tofu shook his head as the wastefulness of it all.

_I did say you wouldn't have to hold back, he admitted. But did you have to kill all of them?_

Standing amid the death in an otherwise stark, empty, and featureless room, Cologne shrugged under her titian cloak. None of these creatures had much potential, anyway.

_Oh?_ Tofu asked. Behind him followed two Sectoids; the aliens mutely examined the carnage. One stared down at a thickly muscled but severed arm.

_Well, then: why don't you tell us_, he continued. _What was the problem? How can we correct it?_

It was one of their reasons for being Trenchards, after all. The aliens had tried introducing "physical enhancements thorough psionic indoctrination" before, using both Mutons and Floaters. The results were unpredictable, and a lack of predictability was not desirable. For the changes to be accepted on a broader scale the end product needed to be reliable and reproducible; the resulting aliens needed to be as mentally stable as they were physically formidable.

They had accelerated the growth of five of the next batch of Mutons as a test run. Cologne had spent the better part of the day with them, teaching them to use the martial arts knowledge that had been flash imprinted onto their brains. Their mental instability had been immediately apparent. Mutons were normally passive creatures, the brawn to the Ethereals' brains, but these versions were aggressive and unbalanced. They fought amongst each other. Earlier reports had indicated that a few committed suicide… which was virtually unheard of among the alien community.

Something was clearly wrong.

_How to put this…?_ Cologne began. _Tell me, Doctor, do you like art? Or poetry?_

_I know little about either_, Tofu admitted. _Why?_

_Wait, please. I didn't ask if you knew anything _**about**_ art or poetry_, she thought to him, and then repeated from before. _I asked if you _**liked**_ it._

He stared at her for a moment before answering, _I suppose I don't. Or never did._

Cologne nodded her head. _Good. Good. I don't either, really. But if you were forced to go to some institute of higher learning and learn all the different types of art and poetry… do you think you would gain an appreciation for it? Do you think it would make you an artist or a poet?_

He considered the question, but only for a moment.

_No_, he replied, with finality._ It is very unlikely._

_You see what I mean, though_, Cologne quickly noted. _Your problem, Doctor, is that you are both a martial artist and a man of science. You have always tried to find some middle ground between these two aspects of yourself. But martial arts… is art. At least on the level we're talking about here. It isn't enough to be bred to use it, to be taught it, you must love it… embrace it… be willing to sacrifice for it!_

She stooped down and picked up one of the Muton students' severed heads.

_Look at this sad creature. You crammed so much knowledge into its head that it couldn't decide when to attack and when to defend, much less how to attack and how to defend. To begin with, true martial Arts skill is rarely hereditary. The finest perigee can still produce only failure… true skill is the product of personality, and personality is not wholly genetic. These creatures fail, and will always fail, so long as they have the knowledge, but lack the experience, the control, and the personal sacrifice necessary to succeed. At best, perhaps one out of twenty of these drones may prove worth while._

Tofu didn't dispute her conclusion; not only was she the most experienced of all the Trenchards (and aliens) when it came to physical enhancement through psionic augmentation (or "martial arts"), but his own research into the problem had produced a similar line of thought. Sadly, a solution to the problem was less obvious. Cologne, meanwhile, tossed the severed head to the side and set to work fixing her hair. In his time with her, he had learned that she often acted overly casual when she was one step ahead of her counterpart in a conversation (or a fight).

_Go on_, he prompted, knowing she would want one.

_I suspected this would be a problem some time ago, when I first learned of these experiments_, Cologne elaborated as she finished straightening out her long dark hair. _The solution is in those girls I arranged to pick up back at the village._

_Those girls…?_ Tofu asked. He knew about them, of course: Cologne had sent letters to the village, not only telling them to not cooperate with UNETCO, but also to a number of less influential individuals. She had told them to meet her outside the village during the night of the attack. Of the twelve who had received letters, only four had escaped the fate of the village and survived their rampaging sisters. Those four had then been picked up by Zraz's soldiers.

_Ah…_ he began to see what she meant. _You theorize that we may be able to use these four Amazons as templates?_

Cologne nodded slowly. _Yes. It shouldn't be very difficult, and once you… we… have isolated the parts that are useful, we can just cut out and replace all the rest._

_Or we could just use your brain instead…_ Tofu began, though the seemingly sinister thoughts were delivered in an emotionless and wholly professional tone.

_You could_, Cologne admitted, unfazed._ But I think you need me alive for the next few days._

He frowned._You know what I mean._

Cologne rephrased herself. _Then let me put it this way, Doctor: would you put the engine of a sports car into a pickup truck?_

Tofu's drawn back face creased into a mockery of a smile.

_All right…_ he thought, after a few long seconds. _Then I'll see you tomorrow. Oh, and… _he pointed to what had once been his lower lip.

"What…?" she asked, and reached up to her own mouth. Looking down at her hand, she could see a bit of blood on the tip of her middle finger. Slowly, she turned her head to one of the fallen Mutons: a green skinned goliath of a humanoid, still in one piece but lying face down in a pool of orange-red blood.

"Interesting," Cologne finally said with a serene smile on her lips as she turned back to the Doctor. _See if you can put that one's guts back in him, would you?_

Tofu nodded. _And the others?_

Cologne rolled her slender shoulders and shrugged as she headed towards the exit behind him.

_Recycle them for parts; turn them into soup. It doesn't matter to me._

* * *

"You'll excuse me for saying this… but your story stretches the imagination."

Shampoo and Mousse sat comfortably in Perfume's living room, the three of them having just finished discussing the situation that brought the two younger Amazons to America. With Perfume's daughter out of the house (she had been given the car and had left some time ago), they had been free to speak, though Perfume had not been privy to much more than a fraction of the truth about UNETCO and the alien war. They had also carefully not mentioned that the FBI had been watching the house and had bugged the phones.

For her part, Perfume had told the two of them her story, from her point of view. Her actual Exile had occurred when they were just children, and so they had no real memory of it beyond hearsay and rumor. Perfume's version of the story went much the same as the rumors had indicated, though with an understandably more sympathetic leaning.

Perfume had been the first (and only) Amazon ever to study abroad in the West. A promising student and highly skilled martial artist, there had been high hopes for her as a leader of the next generation of Amazons. Her natural elemental paradigm had been the Wood element, and she had developed a deep interest in medicine. She had gone to a regional college, and from there, applied to several overseas institutions. The Council had, at first, been quite interested in the benefits of sending an Amazon abroad to study. They had given her five years' leave from the village, the maximum allowed under Amazon Law, to pursue a medical degree in the States.

In that time, Perfume had written home repeatedly. She was a student during the seventies, and her perspective of the outside world had made her letters very popular topics of discussion in the village. As expected, after five years away from the tribe Perfume had earned her medical degree and duly returned at the behest of the Elders. For a time, things looked well…

Except that Perfume herself had changed. She was not the obedient Amazon the Council expected. She continued writing about how the village could learn from the West, in particular how it could "become more liberal and progressive." At one point she maintained she could statistically prove that more than half of all Amazon women were unhappy with the status quo, and in particular the draconian Amazon marriage laws and the decades long rule of ancient Elders that monopolized the Council. She quickly became even more popular among a fringe population ('that vocal minority of the majority,' Perfume called it) that called for reforms within the village.

It was around one event in particular that the story diverged from its traditional telling. Shampoo had been taught that Perfume had attempted a coup, and that she had tried to assassinate the Elders. As she told the story, Perfume had gathered her friends and like minded individuals to stage the unheard of: a protest. They had marched on the Council Chambers, and once there the Elders had met them and ordered them to disperse. Ultimately, most had done so.

The next day, all save a few had been exiled or publicly punished for their act of insurrection and treason. Under interrogation, it was revealed that Perfume had a personal stake in changing the marriage laws. She had already gotten married while attending school. Incensed at the rabble rouser, she had been told to prove evidence that the male in question defeated her in combat. She had none. She had then been told to renounce the marriage and not leave the village – demands she had refused. The Council then stripped her of her family titles, sealed her techniques, and exiled her from the village.

She eventually returned to the States.

"I don't blame you for being skeptical," Mousse replied, sitting on the couch next to Shampoo. "All we have to show for ourselves is Sin Ke's letter. But everything we've told you is true."

"You have our word as Amazons," Shampoo said, stressing the 'our.' Perfume took note of this, as she looked from her to Mousse.

"Let's suppose, hypothetically, that I believe you two…" She leaned back in another chair off to the right side of the living room TV. "What do you want from me?"

"I, we, need your help," Shampoo pleaded. "Your experience! You can help us create a new Amazon village!"

Perfume tilted her head slightly. "And what makes you think I want to help make a new Amazon village? In case you haven't noticed, I have a home of my own… a family. My oldest son is a doctor; something he'd never have had the chance to be had he been born in the Amazon village. You've met my daughter: she doesn't care about martial arts, and I accept that about her. In fact I'm glad she doesn't want to be an Amazon. I'm an American citizen now, and I have no intention of going back to some mist shrouded village in the mountains of China."

"But… how can…" Shampoo momentarily struggled with how to say it in English. "How can you turn your back on… on three thousand years of Amazon history?! I can unseal you! You can be an Amazon again!"

"Shampoo…" Mousse began.

"You don't seem to grasp that not everyone wants to be an Amazon," Perfume said with a touch of sadness. "At least not the kind of Amazon you're thinking of. What's more important to you, Shan Pu: the Amazon village or the Amazon people?"

Shampoo glared at her. "The two are indivisible."

"Maybe," Perfume admitted. "But maybe not. Did you know that the Amazon village has shrunk over the last two hundred years, instead of expanded? This despite never being attacked, never being in any serious fighting, and never being in any danger. Did you know that more than three fifths of the land in and around the village was owned by the five members of the Council of Elders? For most of our history, our people were nomadic – why should we become so attached to a tiny village in an infertile valley?"

"But…" Shampoo started to argue, but Mousse cut her off.

"Are you suggesting the Amazons should be nomads again?" he asked, voice mellow and calm compared to Shampoo's rising ire. The girl wasn't used to being argued with.

"I'm not suggesting anything," Perfume answered. "I just want you both to remember that these exiles like myself… we aren't poor wretches who will jump at the chance to go back home. We've made lives for ourselves. Why not think about what we want? Why not think about what is important to us?"

Shampoo took a deep breath and nodded in weary agreement. "You're right, of course."

"On the other hand," Perfume offered. "The idea does have merit, and I will let the two of you know how to contact the other exiles and their families…"

"Do you still want the counter seal?" Shampoo then asked.

"Are you offering it because you want someone to be able to teach the Amazon techniques you don't know?" the older woman asked, obviously still wary. "Because I have no intention of taking on pupils."

"I'll admit that there is that to it," Shampoo replied, trying to sound sympathetic. "But really, I think it's just the right thing to do under these circumstances."

Perfume didn't respond at first. Instead, she just sat silently, examining Shampoo and her words. Finally, she closed her eyes and rested her hand on her midsection.

"Tempting… but I can't accept the offer at the moment. Sealing techniques disrupt the body's metabolism, and I'm in no condition for it. Which means I wouldn't much help fighting someone like Khu Lon, either. Then again, even in my prime, I wasn't able to beat her."

"However," Perfume opened her eyes, and their strange violet color shimmered in the light. "I can tell you how to fight her."

"You can?" Mousse asked, incredulous. "You know a trick to beating her?!"

"No trick to it," Perfume replied ruefully. "But like all martial artists, she has strengths and weaknesses. Counter the strengths, exploit the weaknesses, and she can be beaten."

"You learned this from fighting her just once?" Shampoo asked, still impressed that the woman could read battle auras despite being branded with the Demon Seal.

"Not from fighting her, no." Perfume smiled at the irony. "You see, early on in my life my elemental affinity began to be reflected in my body. I may not look it, but I'm rather hard to kill…"

She continued, "My body interested the Matriarch, because thirty years ago she learned she was dying of cancer. I was her student for three years. In that time I helped her develop the body manipulation techniques that kept her alive. Those same techniques, applied decades ago, keep me looking and feeling younger than I actually am, even with the Demon Seal locking away my ki."

"You were her student…" Mousse whispered.

"That's how you could tell who I was," Shampoo guessed.

Perfume nodded. "That's right. I saw a bit of her in you right away. But I'm surprised you don't see the resemblance in me… after all, you are my niece."


	72. Once Upon a Time in China III

"Let me make this clear…"

Cologne's father was, at the moment, being unusually talkative.

"The bonds of kinship between us mean nothing to me."

But at least he was being honest.

"Fate has smiled upon you, however. As I am duty bound to assist this child with his education, you, too, may experience Enlightenment through my fists."

Cologne inclined her head in silent thanks, ignoring the jab to her heart about the irrelevance of family ties. Kinship was very important among the Amazons, even if they did not usually acknowledge the male contribution to the extended family. Across from her in the small enclosed shrine sat her father and the tiny midget-man named Happosai. She had him to thank for this reversal of fortune. From what the young man had said, he was an orphan who had been raised by one of Ho's contemporaries in the East.

Cologne's father let out a long, deep breath that seemed to warm the whole room.

After a few seconds, he continued in a deep rumbling voice, "To progress to even that point, you must gain understanding. Only from gaining understanding can we then achieve Enlightenment. Tell me, daughter: why do you fight? Pride? Honor? Status?"

"I am an Amazon warrior!" Cologne announced proudly. "I fight for my people! I have the scars to prove it."

"Then your reasons for fighting are as empty and pointless as your bravado." Ho's shaded eyes narrowed. Even for her, a veteran of many life or death battles with terrible foes, he was an intimidating man. "In time, your village will die. You will die. Your monuments and records will crumble or be swallowed up by the Earth. There is but one goal to be had in this world: Enlightenment. All efforts should be directed towards transcending the limitations of the human form and human existence."

"I will begin by teaching you this. The child here already has an understanding of what is required of him." Her father let out another rumbling breath. "You will learn that it is possible to reach total Enlightenment without death and that you can control your reincarnation through what your mother called martial arts."

"But…" Cologne interrupted, bowing her head in apology. "It… well, it sounds very vague to me. What is Enlightenment, anyway?"

"That is an easy question to answer, daughter." For the first time, she saw her father smile. It was hardly a friendly smile, however; it promised hard work and pain. "Enlightenment is control of the cycle of death and rebirth. It is control over the human form. It is the awakening of the mind and the joining of a greater universal consciousness. Do not be fooled. This existence we seek comes not from compassion and love, but from self restraint and absolute austerity. As I said: you will feel Enlightenment through my fists..."

Next to her father, she could hear Happosai softly chuckle.

'This little man… does he really belong here… in our company?' she couldn't help but think. He looked so weak and pathetic. 'Who is he?'

"I will do what is necessary," she said, determined not only to learn what she could from her father, but prove her own indisputable worth in the process.

What followed was, on later reflection, the worst two months of her life.

Her father had proved to be a grueling and thoroughly ruthless taskmaster, even by esoteric martial artist standards. He deprived his two students of food and water; he worked them to the bone and gave them impossible tasks to accomplish. Then he began to reshape their battle auras. It was, he believed, the essential first step towards pushing the body and spirit into an Enlightened state. Cologne had learned some limited control of her aura as part of her advanced Amazon training, but nothing as ambitious as her father attempted.

To her disgust and frustration, Happosai proved far more malleable in that respect than she did. By the end of the first month, he had already learned to draw sustenance from outside sources: to use his aura to literally take the residual life energy of things around him. He was still an ugly little dwarf of a man (and a pervert, too, she had quickly learned), but he was getting stronger. All this, while she, the genius of the village, struggled with hunger and thirst as her aura failed to adapt to survive.

"Impossible!" she had called it once, in yet another argument (if you could call her yelling at him and him saying nothing an argument).

He had then said, simply, "Observe."

He had walked out to the waterfall where he meditated, and sat down among the rocks and gravel. He then lay down so that his entire body was submerged. Curious and confused, she had waited for him to get out of the water and explain himself. An hour later, she was still waiting. In fact, she had grown tired of waiting for him to give up or die. After only three hours she had lifted his head out of the water and told him that she got the point.

"Good," he had said.

And promptly went back to meditating under the waterfall.

* * *

Sitting among the purple vines and blood red moss, Cologne winced at the memory.

* * *

"Still havin' problems, huh?"

Cologne's wince became an angry scowl at the slurred Chinese Happosai used when he'd been drinking. He seemed to be using it as training, since the amount of alcohol he imbibed in one night would more than kill a normal man or woman. And if it wasn't some weird form of body training, then it meant he was a habitual drunk… just one more in a long line of faults the little dwarf-man had.

Opening her eyes she saw him looking like a homeless beggar, an oversized bottle of clear liquid in one hand almost as large as his body. It was half empty. While she had been spending her time meditating in the rock garden outside the temple shrine, he had obviously gone to the nearby town and gotten plastered.

"I think most of my problems would evaporate if I wasn't constantly being molested and peeked on by you, Happy," she growled, still not sure why she used his stupid foreign-sounding nickname. She tossed a rock at his head for good measure. "Shrivel up and die!"

He leaned back, casually avoiding the three hundred kilometer per hour rock.

"No need ta' get so snippy with me, doll-face," he slurred, seemingly barely able to stand on both feet. She threw another rock; he moved his head just to the side and avoided it, apparently without trying. Just her luck he was a Master of one of the Drunken Fist styles.

"Ya see: I was…" he continued, oblivious to the physical attacks on his person. "Wait, where was I? Oh yeah, I was, you know, practicin'… and I wondered, hey: Happosai old man, why don't ya invite that cutie Cologne to practice with ya? So I rushed right over. Hooch's only half empty, too!"

"I have no intention of coming within groping distance of you, you little pervert!" She'd soon learned that Happosai's idea of 'joint training exercises' was the two of them wrestling in mud. 'Naked' he had said, 'like the Greeks!'

"Besides," she added. "You know I don't drink. Alcohol is disgusting vice."

"You're so cute when you're prudish…" He casually dodged another rock. "Come on, doll…" And another. "Don't be like that…"

Really, all she seemed to be accomplish by it was ruining the layout of the garden. Happosai took another long drink from the massive bottle (dodging another rock then, too), and hiccupped. After a few seconds of melancholy at her rejection, he turned to leave, but paused before actually going.

"What's tha problem yer havin' anyway?" He looked over his shoulder at her, eyes half lidded. "Ya hungry?"

As if on cue, her stomach rumbled. Yeah: she was hungry.

"No!" She insisted.

A look almost akin to guilt crossed his drunken red features, and he spun around before planting himself onto the ground. He stared at her seriously.

"You don't believe in this stuff, do'ya, doll?"

Rather than answer, she asked him the same. "Do you?"

"Hmm…" He thought about it, probably longer than their mutual mentor would have liked, before answering. "I guess I do. Kinda."

"Kinda?" she asked. She still wanted him to hurry up, say his spiel, and then leave… but a part of her was curious.

"Well…" he scratched his chin in stereotypical contemplation. "The way I see it, Enlightenment's great 'till ya actually get there. Like when yer fallin' and think yer flyin' instead. I dunno about you, doll, but I kinda like life's pleasures. So I figure it's a better bet to try and live life as long as ya can, and enjoy those pleasures. Rather than countin' on being happy despite givin' 'em up. How's that go…? Better one egg in the hand than two in the bush?"

He took another drink.

"Yep. That's about what I think."

She could see what he meant. Still: it just meant his life's goal was to be a drunken, debauched lecher. He just wanted to be able to live as long and hedonistic a life as possible. Still, he believed more about what her father preached than she did.

"The problem yer havin' …" he went on to say, still thoroughly inebriated. "Is that yer still thinkin' about this as being one of those element things. It ain't. Not really. Just like I mostly believe in this Buddhist stuff, that's what you believe in. That's why you're having so much trouble."

"I can't exactly change what I believe," she replied, any trace of anger gone. She didn't mind martial arts critique so much. In fact, on the occasions where he talked seriously, she had discovered the little troll man to be a surprising font of wisdom.

"Well… maybe ya should just think about things differen'ly." He poked five holes in the ground. "Let's say these 'ere are yer five elements. Ya got yer, ah, Earth. And yer Fire that's here. And I think Metal and Wood and Water, which is yer type."

"Now," he said, and poked a hole in the middle of the pentagon. "Imagine ya got something in the middle 'ere. What would that element be like?"

"Something in the middle?" she asked, and considered it. "Something that was all of the elements, and none of them? A sixth element like Void?"

"Yep. That's about what yer lookin' fer. Once ya got that down, then yer all set ta go!" He stood back up, almost fell over, and took another long drink. Slowly, he started to waddle away.

"Happy…" she spoke up, still staring at the marks poked into the ground. "What you said… is that really all you aspire to?"

"There was one other thing…" he drawled. He smirked at her over his shoulder. "You just happen ta be lookin' at the Founder and Grandmaster of Anything Goes Martial Arts! The strongest martial arts school ever!"

She favored him with an incredulous stare. "If you're the Founder… then isn't the Grand Master title redundant?"

"Nope," he wagged a finger at her for missing the point. "No it isn't. Because it makes me sound doubly great!"

"I… see…" Though she really didn't.

"Good! Now…" he asked, with his usual lecherous grin. "Are ya sure ya don't wanna have a drink with me?"

She quickly went back to staring at the pentagon he'd drawn and the point in the middle of it.

"No thank you, Happy." She looked up only briefly to see his retreating form. "Thanks for the offer, though."

"Yer loss. You change yer mind, I'll be waitin'" And then he disappeared back around the side of the shrine.

Watching him go, she wondered for the first time if someone in the village wouldn't 'take one for the team' and put the little freak to some use. He was strong, and extraordinarily talented, after all. Conditioner was still single, wasn't she?

* * *

Mousse had been listening to the television in his room and gradually drifting off to when the door bell rang. There was, of course, only one person it could be.

"Ukyou? What the hell are you…?"

A fist to the face kept him from finishing his sentence.

"Put your glasses on, would you?"

With a flourish of his fingers, a pair of glasses appeared in his previously empty hand. Putting them on, he saw Shampoo and sighed in relief.

"Ah, Shampoo! So this isn't another weird dream…"

"Do I even want to know why you would have weird dreams about that spatula freak coming to your room?" Shampoo asked, deadpan.

"Because I'm a guy?" Mousse answered, and Shampoo knocked him upside the head. A gesture that also sent his glasses flying.

"It was a rhetorical question!"

Mousse made an identical flourish with his other hand, and put on the other pair of glasses that appeared there. He got a good look at the girl he'd loved for most of his life (hell – all of it, except like the first five years). She'd come over wearing just a shirt and pants, and he knew from experience that Shampoo was that particular breed of Amazon who preferred to wear as little extra clothing as possible. She had always been loveably catty, even long before she got her Jyusenkyou curse. Then again, like a cat, she had little problem lashing out at anything that happened to be nearby when she was in a bad mood.

He knew why she was here. Why she had come to him.

"Got any other rhetorical questions?" he asked, walking around the room to sit on the bed. She did the same, though she sat at the other end.

Shampoo smiled; glad for once that he knew her so well. "I've been thinking about what Perfume said."

"About Cologne or about the village?"

"Both, I guess."

"I can understand that…"

Shampoo looked up at him, grief on her face. "Mousse…. do you think, even if we tried, that we could recreate the village?"

He sighed and crossed his arms. He hadn't been looking forward to answering this question in particular.

"I dunno," he used the English vernacular he'd picked up over the last couple weeks. "Maybe. But it would never be like it was, Shampoo. If nothing else, think about this: there are no more Amazon men. There are a few who, like me, ran away… but they won't want to go back to being in a village that treats them like trash. I doubt you'll find outsider men who are keen to give up their lives, either…"

"I guess what I'm saying is that the old village, the old Amazon ways, aren't going to be seen as very acceptable anymore. No matter how beautiful their wives are, men aren't going to become chattel. And as long as I'm around…" he took the opportunity to look at her, his expression totally serious. "I won't let it happen either. I swear I'm the last Amazon male to be treated like a second class citizen. Like less than a human being."

"Was…" Shampoo leaned slightly towards him. "Was it really that bad, Mousse?"

His stare turned into a glare; something she had never really been on the receiving end of from him. Drawing back a bit, she looked away, a little shameful.

"I didn't quite mean it like that," she said, trying to talk about the situation reasonably. "But look at it this way: you men didn't have to go out and fight and die or anything. All you really had to do was work that you'd have done anyway... planting rice and all that."

"The issue isn't the work we had to do," Mousse replied, voice still serious. "It wasn't even the conditions we lived under. The problem wasn't that at all. You're talking about human dignity. About not treating men like property. About not having laws that say breaking a horse's leg is worse than breaking a boy's."

For a moment, just a moment, Shampoo wondered if Mousse had been that boy in Sin Ke's store house. Even if he hadn't, he had to have heard about it. The men talked among themselves, after all. She hadn't been the one to hurt the boy, but she couldn't help but feel guilty about it now in a way she hadn't considered before.

"As if men don't treat women the same way…" she began to argue.

"And that justifies what? Doing the same thing you condemn men for?" Mousse shook his head at the hypocrisy. "I'm not here to whine about the past. I'm just saying it won't happen again. Not if I can do anything about it."

For a few seconds, they sat in silence.

"You sure you still want me on your Council of Elders?"

"I already said I did," she replied with finality. "Don't make me repeat myself."

"Heh," he made a single short laugh. "Sorry."

"So…" Shampoo said, trying to sound upbeat. "I guess the only thing to do is make up some kind of new Amazon village. Or community. Or what, exactly?"

"Just that," he replied. "A community. Of martial artists. Strong ones. You already know some of the best on the planet. Between the Two Squads, we could've probably taken the whole village on by ourselves."

"But husband… but _Ranma_… isn't an Amazon."

"He's a girl half the time," Mousse quipped. "That's better then none!"

"Terrible!" Shampoo yelled, though she did so through a smile. "He's an outsider, anyway. Even if there was a village, he'd never really _be_ an Amazon."

"But he knows Amazon techniques," Mousse countered. "He's mastered the Ascending Dragon more than anyone I know of. Maybe more than Cologne herself. Ryouga's Breaking Point overcame an Elder's whole repertoire of Earth based techniques. And techniques aside, they all have a love of the Art… a desire to know it, to teach it, to protect its secrets. That's how the first Amazon village started. Maybe that's how the next one should, too."

"You think so…?" Shampoo asked.

"Was that question rhetorical?" he asked right back.

She thought about his words, and smiled. "Maybe…"

"There's also the matter of Cologne, though," Mousse reminded her, and her smile deflated somewhat. "You heard what Perfume said. Do you think you can do it yourself? We'd all help you train for it. You know that."

Shampoo leaned forward and to the side, letting her long perse colored hair obscure her face.

"No…" she said, and he could see her shaking her head slightly. "I don't know if I could… even if I was strong enough. And I'm not. At least not yet. What we learned… it's something everyone needs to know. I don't want a monopoly on revenge. It'll be enough for me that someone brings her to justice. It doesn't have to be me."

"You sure?" he asked, just to be absolutely clear.

"Yeah. I'm sure." She looked up at him, and in that moment he wanted to try and embrace her, no matter the risk of physical rejection (and injury). Instead, he held out his hand… and to his surprise felt her take it in one of her own. She gave him a rough squeeze, and he returned the strong grip.

It felt good – her hand, her grip; her friendship.

* * *

Cologne sat in the garden, the snow falling all around her. She hadn't eaten in days, but she didn't feel hungry. She hadn't had a drop of water to drink in over thirty hours, but she wasn't thirsty. In the open palm of her right hand, she held a small rock. In the left, a piece of dry wood, slightly dampening in the falling snow. Eyes closed, she could feel the concentration and the intent rippling through her body, through her mind… and through her invisible battle aura.

In one hand, the stone exploded into a thousand pieces.

In the other, the wood burst into flame.

* * *

ATTEND

Cologne entered the lift, and felt herself drawn upwards and into the nerve center of the base. Inside, despite the darkness, she saw her patron: Hollow Eyes. He floated near the two other highest ranked Ethereals that were his counterparts: Wink and Scarred Face. By her understanding, he was the third most influential and powerful in their little Triumvirate. The base's Sectoid Commander was also present, though far less of a mental and physical presence than his Ethereal peers. There was no sign of the base's Muton or Snakeman Commander. She knew the Floaters present were too small in number to warrant anything more than a two squad leaders.

DESIRE YOUR THOUGHTS DESIRE THEM

_How may I assist?_ Cologne thought back, her own mental projection easily overshadowed by Hollow Eye's psionic roar. There was a vast gulf between him and the many Ethereal soldiers on the base – one that she had almost forgotten. It was as vast a gulf in power and skill as existed between her and the rank and file Amazon warriors of her now vanished village.

THIS

A flood of information washed over her mind. She had to fight to slow it down to a manageable pace. She was still unpracticed in the sort of mental oversight that the Ethereal masters took for granted. She quickly sorted through it, and realized what it was: sensory data, uploaded through the Mind, regarding the undercover Sectoids with Jyusenkyou curses. It was human sensory data, too, which was why she had been brought in to help analyze and interpret it.

Most alien infiltrators were still basically alien in their thought processes and their perception of the world. A Sectoid infiltrator, or even a human clone, typically saw the world in ways an alien could quickly understand or translate. These Sectoids on the other hand, were turned into humans, lock, stock and barrel. For an Ethereal, it had to be like a human looking at the world with compound eyes. Or maybe like a dragonfly having its vision cut down from a thousand facets to just one.

RECOGNIZE ANY OF THESE HUMANS

_No. I don't… but I don't know every __Phoenix__ tribesman or local villager._

Hollow Eyes turned to one of the other Ethereals. This was the one she called Wink. When it thought, she could feel the difference in it, like how two people saying the same thing still sound different.

USELESS

_I resent that!_ Cologne boldly thought back.

The three glared at her.

_Besides…_ she quickly added. _There does seem to be something unusual about what you sent me. That radio. Why did it play the same thing over and over? Why were all the guards wearing masks, even at night?_

CONJECTURE THESE PERCEPTIONS ARE GENUINE

_Are you sure?_

WE HAVE CHECKED WE ARE SURE YOU DO NOT KNOW YOUR PLACE

_I did not mean to challenge your interpretation of these events. I was told to attend. I was told to share my thoughts._

THIS IS CORRECT

This last thought belonged to Hollow Eyes, and she was thankful for it. It deflected some of the attention of the other two. For a while, they simmered in their own personal thoughts.

_Who is going to lead the attack on the humans in this place?_ She asked, trying to sound the part of the innocent and curious little human.

WE SHOULD BE SURE BEFORE WE ATTACK

IF YOU WILL NOT ACT THEN I WILL I WILL HARVEST THEM

WE SHOULD NOT DELAY MUCH LONGER

Cologne slinked back a few feet, and listened. She quickly confirmed that Wink was eager to 'harvest' the humans at the Sanctuary District they had uncovered. He was quite eager to take the fight to the humans that opposed them, and he was obviously quite the fan of terror sites and other means of brutish intimidation. Her benefactor, on the other hand, was far less interested in confrontation, preferring instead to use guile and subterfuge and human agents. Wink was the one more interested in enhancing the current crop of aliens, while Hollow Eyes seemed more inclined to create more Trenchards.

Scarred Face seemed to be the Ethereal equivalent of a bureaucrat.

In fact, she strongly suspected that the Sanctuary District was some sort of trap. The memories and sensations were genuine, but she knew there were ways to fake "genuine" memories. Just because you saw a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat, doesn't mean that he actually did. She had not said as much, but then again, she _had_ said that she had suspicions.

In the end, Wink convinced Scarred Face to let him lead the attack, since Hollow Eyes preferred to wait. He wanted to exact retribution on the humans and personally wring the information out of their women and children. The Mind was always gladdened by a blow to the morale of those opposing their work. Hence, Wink wanted the Mind's approval, and he was quite confident that his Sectoids could not be fooled.

Cologne rather suspected he would never be seen again.

She smiled at the thought.

* * *

**China****, 1882**

It had been almost twenty years since Cologne had seen her father. Walking the weathered path to the temple shrine, she saw how overgrown things had become. Passing by the hot springs, at least, she could see that things had not changed a great deal. Testing the water, she found it icy cold, but most everything else was the same. She saw the old tree where she had first caught Happosai peeking on her, and the stump of another tree she had destroyed while trying to kill the little troll. A curious mix of nostalgia and anger flowed through her at the thought of him, and the time they had spent together.

Then she cursed him out loud for the ruin he had brought to the village.

At the shrine itself, she found the building in only a slight state of disrepair. The compassionate bronze Buddha still sat, hands in a gesture of prayer, and face serene and contemplative. The statue had not been polished, however, and she could see a fine layer of dust about it. Out back, the rock garden was overgrown with weeds.

"I suppose he died, then…" she had mused, after seeing the garden itself. She considered turning back; she had come to tell her father, her only living relative now that her grandmother was also among the deceased, that she had become a member of the Council of Amazon Elders. Soon, she would become Matriarch. Truthfully, she wasn't entirely sure what she would say to him beyond that fact, but she was getting older, and she felt that he had to at least know of her success… and his grandchild.

Picking her way through the woods, along a now forgotten trail she would never forget, she same upon the waterfall he so loved. The sun was setting, but despite the impending darkness, she could see and hear it just up ahead. Standing at the edge, she could see a silent figure sitting in the middle, parting the flow of water. The broad shoulders, the great and giant body, the stern and uncompromising face… it was undoubtedly him.

Carefully, Cologne reached out and touched the statue. It was hard, like obsidian, but not. There was no warmth to it. The likeness in the stone was too true to life, too accurate, to be the product of human sculpture. A chill ran down her spine at the realization of it: that her father, mad to the end, had finally gotten his wish. Cold water pooled around the statue's crossed legs, and she realized: he had been the hot springs.

"Is this your idea of Enlightenment?" she quietly asked.

As expected, Cologne's father answered only with silence.


	73. Doppelganger I

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. The UNETCO timetable moves ever forward, but a new complication has arisen as the alien forces in the Far East surge out in unexpected numbers and with surprising fury. Though the Sirius Conspiracy has been crushed, Cologne and the other corrupted martial artists are among the aliens, refining the development of alien hybrids. With Mousse and Shampoo in America with Perfume, India Squad heads off for a mission without him – participating in a trap of Ranma's design.

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia**

Chapter XXV

_Doppelganger_

* * *

**Somewhere in ****China**

"Hey. You guys think Ukyou would go out with me?"

Ryouga looked up from the partly dismantled weapon in his hands to stare at his team mate. "Excuse me. What was that?"

"Ukyou," Ryu said again. He had a perfectly straight face, too, which meant he hadn't been kidding. He had already finished cleaning the ejection chamber of his carbine style plasma rifle, but he hadn't reattached the Aimdot or optical sight yet. XCOM-make laser and plasma weapons were customizable to a significant degree, and most soldiers preferred to reuse the same weapon over and over. As martial artists as well as soldiers, it fell to them to incorporate the weapons into their personal styles. It was an experimental and iterative process.

"Well?" Ryu asked again. "Do you think she'd go out with me?"

"Why would you even _want_ to ask?" Ryouga asked right back.

"Come on…" Ryu replied, as if the phrase was, in and of itself, enough of an answer.

"Ahhh, the fair Ukyou," Kuno mused from where he practiced nearby, trying to adjust to the weight of his own plasma carbine as he stepped into a sword draw. Kuno's style was the most rigid of all his peers' so it took a fair amount of practice for him to adjust to the use of new weapons and other gear. It also hurt that he wasn't naturally ambidextrous like most of the other Nerima crew. Not willing to accept a small handicap like that, he had started work on a sword drawing technique that incorporated letting go of the weapon and moving it out of the way without losing speed or momentum.

"Yes, I did ask the maiden out once, myself…" The swordsman directed a haughty grin towards his comrades. "That cur, Saotome, somehow convinced her to wear a proper school uniform and I found myself smitten, then and there. A vision of loveliness… fragile, but fierce! … so fierce…"

"She hit you with her spatula, didn't she?" Ryouga asked; a droll expression on his face.

Kuno's perfect teeth sparkled. "Twas quite a blow."

Ryu shook his head sadly. "Did you actually ask her out or did you just latch onto her like you do with Akane?"

The kendoist just chuckled. "Women appreciate gestures of affection, my friend. Consider that some free advice."

"Yeah. I'll remember that…" Ryu turned back to India Squad's Lieutenant. "You know what I mean, though. Ukyou's pretty… pretty hot, isn't she? And she's a martial artist, just like us, and she's…" He searched for a word, obviously a little unsure how to talk about this sort of thing. "Spirited, I guess. I've never met any other girls like her."

Ryouga lolled his head to the side and sighed. "I guess I can see what you mean. I thought she was pretty cute, too, when I found out she was a girl."

"You ripped off her shirt, did you not?" Kuno asked between practice swings.

"NO!" Ryouga barked, blushing fiercely. "Who told you that?!"

"Twas the rumor I heard," Kuno replied with a casual shrug.

"Yeah, well…" He scowled, trying to force away his embarrassed blush. "Just so we're clear: RANMA popped her top. And then the bastard kicked me into a wall."

"Why would Ranma…?" Ryu started to ask, but then he remembered what his squad leader had said in the past, particularly about how he'd thought she was a guy at first, and figured it out. "You were about to cave her head in, weren't you?"

"Huh!" Ryouga huffed defiantly. But he didn't dispute it.

"You guys have known her for two years, pretty much," Ryu reminded them. "And she doesn't seem to be chasing after Saotome anymore…."

"I don't know about that," Ryouga interrupted. He had finished cleaning his own plasma carbine, including the attached underslung grenade launcher, and now took his time adjusting the optics arranged on the flattop rail.

"You should remember that Ukyou trained for most of her life to fight Ranma. She trained to get her revenge even longer than I did, thinking of him as an enemy…" Ryouga looked down the length of the rifle, and to his annoyance, he found it hard to imagine Ranma as a target to aim for. He just didn't hate him enough anymore.

Maybe he never had.

"But when the time came, she didn't hate him," he said with a snort. "She still loved him. Maybe it was a stupid childhood crush; maybe it was true love. Who knows? But I doubt she's really given up. More likely, she's just putting things on hold for a while."

Ryu frowned. "But he's going to marry Akane."

Ryouga grunted, and lowered his rifle to slightly adjust the scope. "Maybe."

"Nonsense!" Kuno suddenly declared, but instead of stepping forward and thrusting his sword upwards in dramatic fashion he simply turned and spoke over his shoulder. "Do not mistake familiarity for affection!"

The two other martial artists stared at him in surprise for a few seconds.

"Well!" Ryu eventually said, and with a smile. "That's actually pretty deep, Kuno."

"Besides," Kuno then added with a grin. "Unlike a man, a woman is permitted but one true love by the virtue of heaven. I believe we have all seen how both Akane Tendo and the pigtailed girl yearn tearfully for my affections!"

While the kendoist went back to practicing, laughing confidently at his chances of hooking up with two women (one of which was actually a heterosexual guy), Ryu and Ryouga exchanged glances that implied, 'why even try and correct him?'

"Putting aside where you two would go on a date…" Ryouga returned to the topic, though it seemed to annoy him slightly. "Why even worry about it? I thought you wanted to take care of the Dojo thing first."

"That's the beauty of it," Ryu replied with a confident grin of his own. From the _Yamasenken_ master, however, the grin seemed entirely justified. "Signing up for this job was probably the best thing to ever happen to me! I've already got some money saved up, and with the money I'm making now, I'll be able to make a down payment on a nice new piece of land. Actually building the dojo won't be a problem. I'll have one ready in just a few months. I've got the Yamasenken itself back thanks to you, and soon I'll have a formalized Kumon version of it distinct from the Saotome style, thanks to all the practice and training I've had with you guys."

Ryu went on. "But, best of all, I realized that once this war is over with, we'll be heroes. Think about it: we'll be famous! Students will flock from all over the world to try and learn our martial arts – you've said you don't plan on teaching anyone your family style, right? Ukyou probably feels the same, and I know Mousse doesn't plan on ever taking on anyone more than a single apprentice. That means the only two teaching schools will be the Saotome and Kumon Styles."

"You don't sound worried about competing with the Saotomes…" Ryouga noted.

Ryu chuckled and fell back against the grass. "Not at all! Mister Saotome is too lazy to teach classes, and I doubt Ranma will want to put much effort into it either. Ranma may be a great martial artist… but have you ever heard him actually talk about teaching? Does the Saotome style seem like it's designed for ease of teaching?"

"But I suppose you'd teach the Demon God Assault Bomb to anyone, is that it?" Ryouga asked, his voice betraying a hint of dismay.

"Absolutely!" Ryu replied with another happy, if somewhat sinister, laugh. "Anyone strong enough to learn it, and anyone willing to pay. Do you really think its fair, keeping your best techniques in your family?"

Ryouga inclined his head. "I see what you mean. Not that I agree with it."

The _Yamasenken_ master nodded his head, respecting that his squad leader didn't agree. It was a matter of how one saw martial arts. To Ryouga, to most of the Nerima crew, martial arts were a strictly family affair. The "true" art was only taught to a chosen successor, and that successor was usually an immediate relative. Ryu had a more pragmatic, more populist, view of martial arts: anyone with drive and determination should have the opportunity to become a powerful martial artist. He didn't want the Kumon Style to be an obscure and esoteric fighting art. He wanted it to be recognized by the world!

"All I'll need after that," he explained, smile fading a bit. "Is a family. I think the Kuonji style compliments my own plans for the Kumon dojo. I was pretty impressed by how her father could use his restaurant itself as a weapon…"

Ryouga smiled at the look on Ryu's face – so _that_ was it.

It was hardly a surprise: most of the martial artists he knew weren't really very romantic creatures. Most were either desperate or calculating. From the moment he met the man, Ryouga had pegged Ryu as one of the latter. He knew the breed fairly well, since he normally ended up fighting against them. He'd typically thought of Ranma as one of them, too, but he'd grown less sure of that assessment over the last year.

"Ukyou isn't as powerful as her father," Ryouga observed, testing his team mate a little to see what his response would be, and where his interests actually lay.

"That's true…" Ryu admitted with a little sadness, but then quickly perked up. "But she'll get stronger. I never actually thought a girl could get as strong as she is already. I mean, I never ran into many really good martial artists who were also women. Have you?"

Ryouga thought back to a few of them: Kodachi was pretty good, though mostly only in her one narrow field of expertise; Asuza was kind of formidable, but mostly she was just a nuisance; Akane was actually somewhat mediocre, even now; Shampoo was very good, but again not really great; he'd heard about a girl called Mariko who was really strong, but he hadn't been in Nerima for that particular adventure.

"Hey, Kuno!" he called over to the practicing swordsman. "You remember a girl named Mariko? Was she strong?"

"Mariko? Mariko…" Kuno paused, thinking back to that time, and to the one girl who'd actually loved him.

"Cheerleader?" Ryouga reminded him. He'd heard some of the story from Ranma and Nabiki before. "You don't remember, do you?"

After a few seconds of deep thought Kuno shrugged. "Nope!"

Ryouga and Ryu hung their heads in defeat. Kuno **would** have a mental block when it came to remembering the one girl he'd ever really had a chance with!

"I see your point," Ryouga eventually conceded. "Ukyou has been improving a lot lately."

"Exactly!" Ryu nodded emphatically. The topic was obviously one he was glad to finally be able to talk to a peer about. "She's the only girl I know who could actually help teach the higher tier Yamasenken techniques. She'd be the perfect addition to the new Kumon Dojo! Though I guess she'd want it to be both a Dojo and a Restaurant… Which is actually an interesting idea. We could charge students for lessons AND food! This is a _good_ plan…"

"In that case," the lost one speculated, mostly without thinking. "Why not just skip the middle man and ask her father for her hand in… _oh no_…"

"That's a GREAT idea!" Ryu snapped his fingers and cheerfully started contemplating how he'd talk Ukyou's father into going along with the 'master plan.'

"I don't think that's actually very wise…" Ryouga cautioned, hoping against hope to head off another Nerima-esque mess. "Maybe you should convince Ukyou first, and then her father? Or better yet: don't do anything at all?"

"Nonsense! It's a great idea! Ukyou's a martial artist! She'll understand!" Ryu sounded convinced. Ryouga didn't. At all.

"Actually, she'll probably get angry and try and turn you into okonomiyaki…"

It was at that moment that Ryouga's nearby helmet began to beep. Ryu and Kuno both stopped immediately and waited as their squad leader put the helmet on his head, and answered the comm.. Ryouga's head nodded a few times, and he slipped the helmet back off as he stood up.

"Suit up and get ready," he ordered, tone of voice professional and serious. "Ryu. When you're done, get Mint and Lime. Kuno. Double check the perimeter. I want everything in place in ten minutes."

"Yes, sir!" both martial artists chorused, and immediately went to it.

Ryouga took a moment to look up at the darkening sky. The moon glowed brightly in the sky, and the stars were starting to come out. They'd been told to expect to fight around this time of day, but he'd still hoped the aliens would get overconfident and attack during the daytime. It looked like they wouldn't be so lucky. A terror mission at nighttime was about the worst of circumstances. At least they wouldn't be at a complete disadvantage…

'Thank God for night vision,' he thought, echoing the sentiments of countless other XCOM soldiers over the last few years. High overhead, a star twinkled.

It was time to get back to work.

* * *

The alien battleship approached from the northeast using the cover of darkness to mask its approach. Contrary to popular perception, alien UFO's did not naturally glow as they maneuvered. A UFO "running silent" was almost invisible to the naked eye by virtue of its profile and speed, particularly at night, and radar was also rather unreliable at tracking the alien craft. The conception of a UFO "glow" was actually dependant on the distance between the UFO and the observer. At a certain distance, and under the right conditions, the atmospheric distortion due to the anti-gravity drive created an optical illusion similar to an unearthly light suspended in the air.

In most cases of "rapid approach" the UFO is basically invisible up to and until the last ten or twelve seconds before it reached its destination. Even the largest alien ships could stop literally on a dime, but when on approach to a sensitive target that could be vulnerable to overpressure wave damage, like a house, the craft began its rapid deceleration a kilometer and a half beforehand. This sent a series of low intensity overpressure waves off into the atmosphere and away from the target on the ground. Once hovering safely above the target, the UFO would quickly land, typically taking between seven and eleven seconds, depending on terrain. This limited the exposure time of the craft and gave any victims on the ground less time to react or flee.

Terror Missions were much the same, even though in that one case, the aliens were committed to destruction rather than discreteness. The alien battleship approaching the supposed UNETCO "sanctuary community" made a textbook approach, and a textbook landing in the most obvious and advantageous area. It even oriented itself in the expected direction. Of course, normally, the aliens would know exactly who was below, and even know what they were thinking, due to ship mounted mind probes. This time their probes were being jammed and filled with static. It would have made them more cautious, but they firmly believed their HUMINT was accurate, and that actual defenses on the ground were basically non existent.

The first alien to disembark was a Sectopod, followed by a squad of Muton terrorists. Encountering no resistance, they secured the area below and around the three story high UFO. It had one main lift that ran up the center of the ship, and that one lift (including a large airlock pod on the bottom level) was the only way in and out of the UFO. More aliens quickly poured out of the double sized airlock doors. They began to spread out, looking for victims… and their human-disguised comrades.

Ryouga's eyes narrowed behind his helmet's faceplate, watching the aliens in viridian tinted night vision. Crouched nearby, Ryu and Kuno waited with Mint and Lime. The lost one had his right hand on the ground, fingertips gently brushing up and down against the soft earth, almost as if he were typing or playing an invisible piano. He waited – and waited - until a second armored terror unit exited the UFO. It was another Sectopod.

'That's two. Intel expected two armored terrorists and four bioweapons…' He remembered, and his middle finger twitched. A part of him wanted to wait, see if another armored unit would emerge, but the aliens were starting to spread out too much. He couldn't risk holding back much longer.

It was time.

"Let's see you dance…" he whispered, eyes widening as his attentions turned to the aliens on the perimeter of the field. One the green skinned mutons took a step onto an inconspicuous patch of grass. He disappeared in an eruption of orange flame. The blast wave knocked another Muton back and onto the ground he'd just walked over. He, too, disappeared amid a cloud of fire and ash.

At the same time, one of the Sectopods took a step back and to the side, when an even larger explosion erupted beneath it. This explosion was not omnidirectional like the previous two. Using the Misznay-Schardin effect, the blast was sufficient to fire a steel plate upwards with enough force to penetrate 76 millimeters of battle tank grade armor. It would kill or cripple a Muton, too, but against a Sectopod the effect was less dramatic. It crumpled and damaged some of the armor around the bipedal robot's heavily armored left foot, but more importantly, it overstressed and broke the articulation joint that attached the foot and leg to the main body. The Sectopod automatically locked the limb in place to keep from falling, but it was effectively crippled and stationary.

Ryouga's pink finger twitched against the ground, and he directed another M-21 anti-tank mine towards the second Sectopod. Already the aliens were heaving towards cover, and two had tossed plasma grenades towards open spaces that were obvious targets for land mines. Ryouga's index finger brushed against the ground and a second later a dozen bounding mines emerged and leapt into the air. A concert of explosions filled the air with murderous shrapnel – enough to shred a platoon of men in an instant. Two explosions then engulfed the staggering second Sectopod, blowing out another one of its legs.

The two explosions from the alien grenades, quite effective at clearing normal human landmines, did nothing to stem the onslaught. Ryouga's fingers worked feverishly, as he directed the deeply buried mines up and under their targets. He quickly expended his heaviest explosives crippling the Sectopods, and then he directed the rest of the AT mines to picking off the Mutons. Normal anti-personnel mines would have been largely ineffective against the night-impenetrable hide of a Muton, but an anti-tank mine was generally more than sufficient to blow off a leg, send nearby Mutons flying, or tear an armored torso in half.

The barrage ended after eight horrific seconds.

"Bravo-1, this is India 1. Ordinance expended," Ryouga said, speaking over the TeamComm. The order to engage came immediately afterwards. UNETCO snipers opened fire, raining burning plasma death down on the stunned and crippled aliens. One of the Sectopods barely got off a shot before four plasma blasts melted the front half of it into dribbling slag. The other was less fortunate. It struggled to turn to its side, to try and fire back, but it never made it in time. The rugged alien terror unit absorbed several bright flashes of plasma before crumpling into a broken heap.

Then the martial artists were among them. For his part, Ryouga could run at a sustained speed of over ninety kilometers per hour. Mint was a lot faster. He appeared in a literal flash ahead of his comrades, blade already dug deeply into the throat of one of the still standing Mutons. Even a master of the blade, like Mint or Kuno, couldn't really risk not attacking a vulnerable area. The thickest sections of Muton organic armor could stand up to an anti-tank missile. Luckily, XCOM scientists had identified weak spots were the armor was relatively thin, and not one man present had not done their homework the night before.

Ryouga kicked one of the fallen Mutons nearest to him up and against the side of one of the battleship's five landing pods. Pressing his forearm against the creature's neck, he pressed down and twisted, crushing its neck, and breaking its jaw and spine. It felt like deforming a four inch thick rod of steel, but it was well within his physical abilities. They didn't have time to fool around outside, however. Stepping on another of the aliens and burying it face-first into the ground he quickly reached out to activate the battleship airlock doors.

"Find cover!" he yelled, and the four martial artists under his command reacted instantly, hugging the walls of the central pod that contained the airlock. Sure enough, just as expected, the moment the doors opened something small and fast wizzed out past them. A half second later, an identical 'golden BB' shot past, stopped in mid air, and buried itself into the ground. The Blaster Bomb explosion dwarfed anything that had come before from the man made anti-tank mines. Anyone not braced against something immobile would have been tossed like a leaf in a storm by the overpressure wave. Anyone not armored or protected would have been immolated by heat and impaled by debris. A second explosion, far off, could barely be heard amid the dying and howling winds.

"Go! Go! Go!" Ryouga barked, holding the airlock doors open. Mint vanished in a flash of inhuman speed, followed by Ryu. The massive Musk warrior Lime hustled past in third; exchanging the massive (and normally vehicle-mounted) cannon he'd used before with a delicate looking plasma carbine. Kuno followed fourth, ready to draw his blade against any foe that came too close. Ryouga wanted to follow them… to lead them… But he knew his limitations, and so did Command. Alien battleship interiors were more mazelike than most other alien ships.

He couldn't risk getting lost, and besides: someone had to watch the door.

Altogether, though, things were going very well. He would have to congratulate Ranma on coming up with a plan that didn't completely suck for once. The first time he had tried something like this it had been a total fiasco. Fooling Happosai using some mystic Amazon incense and a bunch of high school actors (including himself, though he didn't remember the P-chan parts) had completely backfired, though things always tended to backfire when one was dealing with that ancient lecher.

This time, Ranma had wisely left the execution of the illusion to someone much more experienced. For almost five days now, Herb had maintained the illusion that the six Jyusenkyou-cursed Sectoids had been in a place called "Sanctuary Community 004." The Dragon Prince already knew about the strength and weaknesses of the hypnotic incense, and he had crafted the illusion "perfectly, of course." Anyone within the area of effect would see what he wanted them to see, and with the aliens exposed to the incense, their now-human perceptions would be skewed to accept it as reality. Day and night the Prince of the Musk Dynasty had done this, without rest, without food, and without water. Not once had the illusion slipped, though the Prince's choice in menu fare had become something of a running joke.

The effort had exhausted him, however, which meant he wouldn't be able to participate in taking the battleship. Still, that wasn't too bad. The biggest remaining threat was the battleship's Ethereal Commander. But Ryu had trained to develop much improved psionic defenses since his first run in with an Ethereal, and Mint was always eager to speed blitz an opponent. As for Lime and Kuno, both of them were resilient, if less than skilled, in psionic combat. Their chances were good now that the two Sectopods (basically immune to martial arts attacks) and most of the ship's Mutons had been taken out of action.

Ryouga reloaded his plasma pistol after dispatching one of said Mutons. The green skinned giants were too tough to even use laser weapons to finish them off. Valuable plasma had to be spent to reliably finish the job the anti-tank mines had begun. Two shots to the head from a couple meters away were generally sufficient to fry away most of the creature's brains and guarantee a kill. Even then, much of the aliens' armored skin and skeleton survived, mute testament to their constitution. It was just too bad for them that an intact skeleton didn't do much good when it went with a poached brain, scrambled in-the-skull.

He took aim and grimly fired; planting another two burning plasma bolts into one of the crippled half dead Mutons. Ryouga didn't feel particularly sorry for them; they had come here to kill women and children, after all. They were just mass produced soldiers, castrated and engineered to serve the Ethereals. Captured Mutons rarely lived more than a few days in captivity, anyway, cut off as they were from their psionic masters. Besides, they had orders to kill all invading aliens and secure the battleship as quickly as possible. The only exception was the Ethereal Commander, as XCOM was always eager to pick the brains of the alien leadership. Literally.

Interrupting that thought, a ping on his HUD motion sensor alerted India Squad's Lieutenant to an incoming visitor in the airlock – roughly man sized and not moving particularly quickly. It was probably a scout. Since he already had a potent enough weapon in-hand, Ryouga turned to face the UFO's access portal. As it opened, he could see inside, and his target wasn't green; wasn't a Muton. He saw glittering orange.

"Ethera--!"

The movement was fast, even for his martial arts senses, knocking aside his plasma pistol before it could discharge. He hadn't expected anything other than a telekinetic strike or telepathic assault, but the attack had felt distinctly like a physical blow. Acting on instinct to compensate for his deflected aim, Ryouga struck with his elbow, but the orange hued form slipped outside the range of the strike. Extending the distance, he slid into an axe kick, and fired as his opponent slipped, like a ghost, around the attack.

'This guy… he's pretty good!' he couldn't help but think, as the titian blur slipped around his attacks, and easily avoided the trio of shots from his plasma pistol. 'It pinpointed the optimal distance between my normal reach and the effective minimum range of my weapon! Is it reading my mind… or…?'

Then the ghost like figure slipped and spun around, trying to find the blind spot behind his back. It would've succeeded, too, if he hadn't side stepped and turned, doing the exact same thing. As it was, the two ended up back to back.

INTERESTING

I WASN'T EXPECTING YOU TO BE HERE

The telepathic projections, in lieu of words, did remind him of an Ethereal. But there was something to them, beyond how uncharacteristic they were, that seemed out of place. The thoughts weren't nearly as solid or as forceful, for lack of a better term. When an Ethereal 'thought at you,' it was like being hit by a rock; this was more like a wet sponge.

'What the Hell are you?' he thought back, projecting the thoughts like he'd been trained to at the Psi Lab. 'You sure aren't an Ethereal.'

A strange wave of all-too-human amusement tickled the edges of his mind.

NO

I GUESS I'M NOT

* * *

'Sectoid? … How convenient!'

Ryu slammed one of the relatively frail aliens into one of the UFO walls and planted a plasma round into its chest for good measure. His boot had made quite an impression on the creature's flesh, but the plasma round he fired did far more. It burned a hole clean through the Sectoid's body before the rest of its superheated fluids erupted, tearing most of the rest of it apart.

He cautioned himself against feeling cocky when it came to the seemingly weak aliens. It was true that, compared to Ethereals and Mutons, Sectoids could be thought of as small fry… but if one got in a good shot, or pulled out a grenade, or if a Leader pinned you with a psi-attack… well, that was all it would take. Normally, he wouldn't be as aggressive as he was, given the situation, but they had to secure the UFO quickly. This was part of their revenge for the Amazon village; this was the same alien battleship that had escaped before; it wouldn't be allowed to do so again!

He also took the opportunity to observe his Musk partner, Mint.

The Saotome style specialized in appropriating (or getting "inspiration" from, or technically stealing from) other martial artists and their schools. The Kumon style _Yamasenken_ that he was building had a similar philosophy, though by design it tended to be more rigid than the original. In particular, he was interested in Mint's incredible speed. Ryouga had explained that the Musk got their uncanny powers from their mothers several generations removed, all of whom were beasts cursed by the same _Jyusenkyou_ spring that turned Ranma into a girl. Mint was part wolf, if the story was to be believed. Regardless, there had to be an underlying mechanic behind his speed, and if the mechanic could be understood, then a derivative technique could be developed.

"Circling around!" Mint announced. His voice reminded Ryu of Konatsu's soprano tone, though a bit more boyish due to his younger age. Mint took two steps and vanished from sight. The kid was fast. No doubt about it. It was impossible to read his muscle tension under the personal armor, but Ryu did detect a non-random _ki _surge around the kid's feet that rose in pitch and then warbled, like a long note hit by the string of a guitar.

A year ago, he'd only have had a vague notion of it, but training with high-elite tier martial artists, learning their tricks, and practicing in the Psi-Lab and Psi-Gym had heightened his _ki_ awareness and understanding significantly. The training there had also broadened his knowledge from a purely technical standpoint. UNETCO research into telekinetic stoichiometry had led to a system of equations used for measurement. In these, they used a unit of measurement represented by a lower case form of the Greek Zeta.

Called a "tik" in parlance (short for Tele-Kinetic or TK), it was originally defined as an approximate unit of force required to move a kilogram weight against the force of gravity at sea level. In this application, it was basically equivalent to one "g," or the force of gravity in meters per second squared. However, unlike, say, a Newton of force, a _tik_ of telekinetic energy could also be expressed as and directly converted into equivalent heat force per second, as well as many other things. In other words, a _tik_ was an intermediate variable capable of intrinsically bridging fundamental principles in physics, chemistry and biology. There was apparently still some debate as to whether a _tik _was an abstract particle or not, since it was impossible to apply telekinetics in a way that isn't measurable in mundane means.

That theoretical stuff Ryu left to the eggheads and labrats.

What mattered was that he could perceive that intermediate force being applied in different ways. Every martial artist of his caliber could see or taste or smell or hear _ki_ being used, it was always different, but through training, Ryu had learned to perceive not just the use of the force, but also its intensity… its magnitude. Going by what he heard, by its pitch and tone, he could surmise that Mint was first using his _ki_ as a purely accelerative force, bypassing his muscles almost entirely and propelling him into a burst of high speed. But that was only half of the trick: what gave him his incredible speed was that he 'ran' along a corridor of _ki_, literally riding it from one location to another. It was a cross between controlled flight, and sticking explosives under your feet.

Of course, it sounded simple, but actually using your _ki_ in that fashion had to be incredibly difficult. One wrong mistake and you'd tear your feet apart, completely lose control of your momentum, or maim yourself internally. There was a good reason why it was best to self-modify your body instinctively, using the subconscious, rather than the conscious. Mint's speed technique was an order of difficulty, or two, harder than even something like _akichi_, the so called 'vacant land' technique. Ryu used a virtually identical family variant of that technique, and all it did was reduce the friction between yourself and the ground, allowing you to "skate" in one direction at high speed. Mint's technique wasn't just faster, but more versatile as well.

He'd have to be careful when he tried to adapt it into the Kumon Style. He'd never tried conscious body-modification himself, but all the ancient masters and weathered scrolls warned against it. Hopefully, he wouldn't have to do anything brutal to get that far. He wasn't keen on mauling himself like a certain Special Lieutenant…

Those thoughts, and more, came and went in an instant.

Ryu silently chastised himself for being distracted, even for a few moments. It was hard to help, though. He was just unusually excited about the progress he was making in refining and improving the _Yamasenken_, and yes, he was thinking a little about Ukyou, too. He had been for a while, but he'd taken a real liking to her during the training, and after she got into a drinking contest with him that night… The girl really could hold her liquor!

'Come on, Ryu! Focus! Remember your mental discipline!' He nodded imperceptibly, concentrating back on the task at hand. 'You've never worried much about girls before, and now isn't the time.'

"Tangos!" Mint announced over Team Comm, though he sounded more amused than worried. "Ooooh, and they're _angry_!"

"Need help?" Ryu offered. He could easily double back.

"Naw," Mint said with a little chuckle. "I'm good, I'm good!"

'Suit yourself, kid.'

There was nothing nearby on motion sensors; nothing on PAWS; nothing unusual on chatter besides Mint's little fight… of course, just because nothing nearby was moving didn't mean there wasn't an alien lying in wait. That was the advantage they had on defense. Palming open the door ahead of him, he quickly swept over the room. It was a narrow space, maybe nine meters wide and forty meters long. This was the second floor of the battleship, in the southwestern quarter. There was another door ahead that led to some sort of technical engine room or the like, but training had informed him to be careful sweeping through it.

He palmed open the next door. Inside were several staggered rows of alien devices, rising from the floor to the ceiling. They looked sort of like missile tubes, or what Ryu assumed missile tubes would look like, but they were a mixture of dark purples and reds, with protrusions sticking out and leading into the floor or the ceiling. It was pitch black inside, with no lights or glow to measure distance or orientation by.

There was another antechamber further south, and he knew to check that first before he wandered around the engine room… or whatever it was. Sweeping his aim down one row of the strange devices, and then another, he saw the door. Standing to the side, he palmed it open. There was no movement on his sensors, so he quickly breached.

The room seemed empty.

That was until he felt a telekinetic blast strike him in the face, nearly plucking the eyes out of his skull. Ryu cursed, yelled "Tango!" but didn't panic. Instinct cried to shield his face with his hands and his arms, but that would have been a useless gesture, and probably just what the alien wanted. Instead he took a step back, out of the room, and swept his arms. He'd meant to unleash a few _Kijin Raishu Tekidans_ (Demon God Assault Grenades), but with his concentration shot by nearly being blinded, the vacuum blades merged into a single, big ragged tear that hovered in midair.

It was a sloppy mistake to make, no matter the circumstances, but then a ray of luck shone through the clouds. The vacuum tear imploded as the _ki_ he'd used to construct it became used up, and as it sucked in everything nearby, it also pulled a rather startled alien down from where it had been hiding, propped up against the ceiling. Ryu saw a blur of orange robes, and pushed yet more mental energy into his colorless battle aura. It flared bright blue just as he opened fire into the room with his plasma carbine as the Ethereal launched another telekinetic attack even as it propelled itself back into the air and out of the way.

Ryu ignored the pressure in his skull even as he recognized the attack. It was a common one he'd been warned about, and one of the favorites of the alien Ethereals. The "pull your eyes out" move was new, but the "pop blood vessels in your body" one wasn't. XCOM had been encountering that friendly little trick for a few years now. With the attack nullified, however, he sneered and popped the top on a grenade before tossing it into the antechamber.

It was a plasma grenade. Probably one scavenged from a dead alien a few years back. At this close range, it would definitely kill even an Ethereal, a task most ordinary grenades weren't quite up to. The only thing the alien could do was get out or try and TK the grenade back the way it came. The latter was almost suicidal, since alien grenades had a telekinetic-sensitive trigger. TK-ing an alien grenade would make it explode almost instantly. Ryu trained his rifle on the doorway, and sure enough, the Ethereal swooped out, riding a cresting wave of telekinetic force.

He let loose with a trio of blasts, even as the buffeting energy threatened to knock him off his feet. As it was, his aim suffered – the first shot went wide. The second was on track, but as the last moment its trajectory altered by a few degrees, hitting the Ethereal in the right arm instead of the chest. The limb vanished in a spray of plasma and atrophied husk-like flesh. The third shot wasn't quite spot on, but it wasn't deflected either, and it hit the alien on the side. It would have been a mortal wound to any normal humanoid, but the Ethereal simply floated back and behind one of the strange devices in the engine room.

'Two mortal wounds…' Ryu thought, with a tinge of anger. 'Mortal, that is, if their bodies weren't basically dead already.'

Ethereals wouldn't loose blood from a ragged burning wound. They wouldn't go into shock and loose consciousness. Unless you hit the heart or the brain, they'd still be dangerous, if not fully active. This alien still had its rifle, too. But it had to be hurting. Even a floating corpse couldn't just brush off losing an arm and half of its guts.

Ryu used his jaw to active his Team Comm. "India-2, confirmed hostile. _Ethereal. Leader_ class."

"Romeo-2," Mint replied after a moment's delay. "I hear ya. Gimme a few seconds."

Ryu calmed himself, took a step back to access the situation, and grimaced as another telekinetic barrage slammed into him. This one was different from before, focused, shaped even, and it drilled through his battle aura. He'd guessed before when he'd said the alien was a Leader class Ethereal, but now he was sure. This was an impressive level of psionics, even aside from the slight plasma bolt deflection it had done before.

He briefly considered using a _Kijin Dai Ran Bu_, but they'd been asked to avoid damaging the inside of the battleship, and the Demon God Big Mad Dance was pretty indiscriminate in its path of destruction. He reminded himself that he wasn't alone. He wasn't fighting alone; he was part of a team, with objectives and expectations. It didn't matter who killed this alien. He didn't have to take stupid, unnecessary risks.

Focusing on his telekinetic defenses, he layered a second battle aura under the first, intercepting the alien's attack. It was similar to a mental lance at first, but then it split, branching out in different directions. Ryu had trained hard to be proficient in using his battle aura as a psionic barrier, but he was far from a master. He relied mostly on brute strength to get the job done. This alien was good. It was better than him.

'But you're hurt… not at a hundred percent…' he thought, viciously. 'And I bet I've got more stamina than you do right now. If I were you, and I realized this, then…'

Ryu ducked behind one of the engine room devices a second before a plasma blast splashed into the wall behind where he had just been standing. As always, his _sakkijutsu_ had paid off, warning him of some approaching threat. Combining that danger sense with the intuition developed from battle, it had been easy to guess at just what the alien planned to do, and from where. Of course it would try and pin him down and shoot him. Ryu flattened his body, took aim down the second row of alien devices, and fired a quick snap shot.

An alien hiss filled Ryu's mind, as the Ethereal mouthlessly shrieked a death cry.

"Heh!" The _Yamasenken_ master smirked as he took a few steps closer, confirming the kill. "Tango down."

"Awww. I missed him?" Mint asked, appearing almost out of thin air a few seconds later. The Musk warrior took a moment to look down at the fallen Ethereal. It was mostly crumpled up inside its blood stained titian robes. There really wasn't much to see.

"Looks like we're done here," Ryu said, heading back towards the central lift. "Time to head upstairs and check out the Penthouse..."

-----


	74. Doppelganger II

The alien drifted towards the ground, seemingly none the worse for wear after protracted hand to hand combat with a man who could literally bat a normal human's head off his shoulders. Ryouga stepped out of the crater he'd had with his right foot, snarling at his lack of progress. Very, very, few individuals could go toe to toe with him for more than a minute. So far, the alien had done little more than dodge and soak up the occasional testing blow. It was frustrating, but it had given him some measure of how this strange new alien fought.

Plus, he still had his plasma pistol, and one or two good shots with that would almost certainly end the fight. This Ethereal was a strange one, though; there could be no doubt about it. It seemed certain that it had had martial arts knowledge uploaded into its mind, and that the information had made it unstable, just like those Mutons and Floaters UNETCO had encountered a while back.

THIS PLACE … THIS TRAP

I WONDER

AHH NOW I SEE

The rapid sequence of thought projections cut off abruptly.

"It was Herb, wasn't it?" the alien suddenly asked, speaking in perfect Japanese. "It must've been. Can't imagine anyone else with this level of skill… and I can still smell the incense. Was it your idea or Ranma's?"

Ryouga stood there, stunned, for all of a second and a half.

An Ethereal that spoke?

It was unheard of.

"Wait. Who am I kidding? Of course it was Ranma's idea! Well, he had to have a good one sooner or later…"

The alien took a moment to look to the side, where a few Spartan buildings stood. The Sanctuary Community was just a converted military depot with a few fake buildings thrown in. It was the foundation for the Illusion Technique Herb had used on the captured aliens, but to anyone not under the spell, it was drab, abandoned, and all-together un-community-like.

"I see you haven't figured it out yet," the Ethereal said, sounding one part amused and two parts disgusted. Reaching up with a light skinned hand marred by a dozen jutting curves of bone, it pulled down the protective wrap covering its face before drawing back its hood. What it revealed was not the pale or purpling flesh of an Ethereal, drawn tight over an alien skull. The face was recognizable, though not altogether human.

"Well, we always were a sucker for disguises!" The alien noted with a chuckle, clearly amused by the shock in Ryouga's aura. The creature had his face: his jaw, his nose, his brow. Its upper lip was curled back, however, displaying a mouth full of sharpened shark's teeth. Creeping under its skin, black veins pulsed darkly, and in place of eyes, it had pale pupil-less orbs. Its head was either hairless or shorn with monk-like precision.

"What the fuck are you?" Ryouga spat, taking an involuntary step back. "Some kind of… of clone?!"

"Eh?" the alien/human gnarred, voice a mangled reflection of his own gruff tone. "A clone? Don't insult me!"

What passed for its smile – just a curve at the corner of the mouth - slowly sank into a frown as it pointed a muscular finger. "Don't think I'm just some copy of you, either. I'm the reason the Mind… the aliens… let you go. They figured: he'll lead us to the others. He's useless anyway, since we can just make a new one that's already half alien. I guess they were impatient."

"So you're a Trenchard?" the lost one surmised, "An alien grown Trenchard."

The other Ryouga opened his mouth and made an inarticulate, inhuman sound that sent a chill up the original's spine. His _sakkijutsu_ had been registering a low to mid level warning since the clone had emerged from the UFO, but now it was going off like mad. Worse than that feeling… far worse… was the sick feeling he felt when he looked at the copy. It wasn't just a perversion. He could see himself reflected in its growing battle aura.

"India-1! This is Bravo-1. Do you need backup? What's going on out there?"

Ryouga triggered the Private TeamComm. "Bravo. Take a shot at this Ethereal when you get the chance. I'm going to flush it out into the open."

"Roger that. The snipers were getting bored."

Switching from the private communications to his helmet's external audio, Ryouga drew his plasma pistol with his right hand, and began to charge the left with emotional _ki_. The depression, the hatred, the anger and the resentment... it all came easily, bubbling out from the slashes and pores in his skin, seeping out of his personal armor and tainting the air green and black. The alien/human hybrid facing him began to laugh, smoky black coils of mental energy rising out from its mouth and the corners of its eyes.

Ryouga crossed his left arm under his right at the wrist, training both his pistol and his _ki _attack on his opponent. Any normal martial artist would have been unable to see his finger tense on the trigger due to the light and hue of his building _ki_ attack, but this eye-less copy of himself was not so easily fooled. Its pupil-less eyes saw past and through, and it moved to avoid the packets of bright green plasma streaking through the air.

'A little slower than my dodge speed,' Ryouga gauged, trying to adjust his aim as his target dodged to the left and right, leaving zig zag trails in the ground. 'Not fast enough to keep dodging forever. My plasma pistol has 26 shots to a clip. Will it wait for me to run out, or…?'

The copy made an abrupt turn, and accelerated off to the right, trying to cut the distance between them, titian robes flaring out around and behind it. Ryouga stepped into an _akichi_ of his own, shooting off to the left and presenting his right side. Normally, he would have wanted to keep his opponent within an arc of fire where he could use both hands to stabilize his aim, but in this case he was hoping to close the distance enough to use his _shishi hokoudan_. He didn't expect a cloud of dust to rise up and envelop his opponent. It was the _bakusai tenketsu_, but he hadn't…

"What's wrong?"

Out of the dust and smoke, a fast shape appeared and snared his left hand. Looking down, just for a moment, Ryouga saw another hand, fingers curled around the _shishi hokoudan_ he'd been holding. The green orb of energy wavered and flickered between the two hands, vibrating at a dangerous level as it lost cohesion and control.

'It's… holding my Lion Roar Shot…?' Ryouga gaped. That shouldn't have been possible. Even if this was his copy, it couldn't just grab his _ki_ attack. The energy between their hands, his energy, let off a small shockwave of green as it further destabilized. Looking up, he saw his doppelganger. While its left hand neutralized his _shishi hokoudan_, its right hand had his plasma pistol pinned against Ryouga's chest.

"You won't beat me like you did Pill…" It boasted; sharp teeth slightly parting as it smiled. "You won't beat the new Cologne like this, either."

Ryouga hid his shock. "You know about that?"

The double just laughed – a rough and nasty sound. Without warning, the bubble of energy between their mutual left hands exploded, sending them flying. It was force enough to concuss a normal man and break his ribs, but the two Hibikis landed easily on their feet twelve meters apart. Ryouga glanced down at his plasma pistol, and then back at his double.

It held the ammunition clip in its right hand.

Ryouga frowned and holstered the pistol. He had a spare clip, of course, but he'd never get the chance to load it under these conditions. His doppelganger just tossed the clip behind him and into the rising dust storm. Ethereal robes whipped up into a frenzy, the hybrid held out his hands, fingers splayed wide. Beneath Ryouga's feet, the ground began to tremble in a building up-swell.

"Let me show you one of the differences between you and me…" the doppelganger chortled as a cloud of dust and smoke rose out of the ground in a thousand tiny eruptions. Cursing silently, Ryouga quickly switched his armor's visual mode to infrared to compensate. It worked for a moment, but rapidly started to degrade into static.

"Mettayatara Metsubushi."  
(Indiscriminate Blindness)

"Hibiki!" Tsuchihashi, the operation's commanding officer, sounded somewhat panicked. "What the Hell is happening out there? There's some kind of dust storm…"

"I…" Ryouga never finished the sentence. He'd been hit by his fair share of strong fighters over the years, but given his skill in grounding, it rarely knocked him off his feet. As he regained his balance and footing, he quickly tried to wipe the accumulating dust off his helmet's visor. It shouldn't have been sticking at all, really. The helmet visor was made of transparent alien alloy, and it was either inert or repulsive to most materials. It would never get fogged up; mud should slide right off; soot would simply not accumulate.

'It isn't so much sticking to the armor… its sticking to my ki. My battle aura.'

Better than anyone alive, he could appreciate the nuance of the move. This copy wasn't just using his old moves. It had made up new ones to take advantage of its inhuman abilities. The technique it had called Indiscriminate Blindness was well named. It would probably stick to the aura of any living thing and migrate towards its center. This meant it wouldn't just stick to the body, but get into the nose, mouth, ears and eyes.

Another blow came in from the side, but Ryouga turned at the last millisecond, partly deflecting it. One advantage he had was that it was easier to anticipate what this hybrid would do, since it had his baseline proclivities. Sliding one arm back, he tried to strike back, fists blurring as he tried to anticipate where he'd be, if he were attacking. It was a desperate gambit, but every so often, his opponent would block a blow instead of dodging it.

'I've improved my Nian Jing since we parted ways…!'

_Nian Jing_ was the Chinese martial art technique of maintaining contact with an opponent, and using that contact to determine their posture and intentions. Also called "sticking" _jing_, it meant that he could read his opponent after just a moment's contact. He wasn't as good with it as Ranma, but then he'd never needed to be. He wasn't the type of fighter to favor dodging anyway, so he tended to make plenty of contact with his opponent by default.

After a few seconds of frenzied combat, and some two hundred and forty six blows, the doppelganger tapped his foot. Ryouga felt the move more than saw it, and he did the same. Between them, the ground cracked and caved in. Widening his stance, Ryouga grounded himself; his perception of the world altered slightly, becoming something more akin to echolocation, as his aura detected the changed in the web of breaking points all around him. His fight with Pill had heightened his senses when it came to the _bakusai tenketsu_, and he felt that martial rush wash over his senses again. He was already a master of the baseline technique, and he'd been working harder than ever before to go beyond the next level.

'You want to match tenketsu with me?!' he thought angrily, and swept his foot a few inches to the side. Implosions shook the ground to his left, and an explosion went off several feet to his right. Taking a step forward, a half dozen breaking points triggered prematurely. He didn't need to move to trigger the points, but he did need to keep his front facing his foe. Then two pinpricks of light emerged from the all concealing smoke, carving apart the thick clouds as they came closer. It took a moment, all of a quarter second, to realize what he was seeing.

Whirling his arms in an instinctive blocking motion, he partly deflected the two _shishi hokoudans_. Instead of going off square in front of him, most of their concussive force instead projected out and to the sides. The attacks had been smaller, but much more… concentrated… than his own _ki_ attacks. His own _shishi hokoudan_ had a wide area of effect, partly because it was designed to hit an opponent faster than himself (namely Ranma), and partly because it was very hard to concentrate large amounts of _ki_ into a small space. It was akin to trying to hold a gas together; it naturally tried to disburse back into nature.

'A pin-prick lion roar shot… ?' he wondered, but could guess at the effects. Instead of spreading the concussive force across the entire body, it would direct it in a narrow cone. That would be bad, even for someone with his constitution.

He felt another series of breaking point attacks building, this time from all around him. He countered every one, but then he saw another flash of movement. Unable to block or dodge in time, another blow hammered into his face. His personal armor had an aerogel layer that helped to soften the effects of impact, but that was designed to mitigate trauma caused by explosive impacts and shockwaves. At this level of force, it was all but useless.

Another blow came, this time to the neck, before he could counter a third to his temple. The double was obviously trying to take his helmet off. Ryouga shrugged off the danger, the worry about that, and stepped into a blow of his own. He felt it connect all down his arm, knocking the hybrid Ryouga back. It felt good to get a hit in again, but although the blow had been sound, his double immediately sprang back into action.

'It didn't even phase him?' Ryouga wondered, trading blows. He could hear the other him laughing, and then it did something unexpected.

It head butted him.

The lost one fell back, hit the ground, and sprung back up to his feet. Even through his personal armor, the blow had stung. It wasn't really a surprise that he'd be strong enough to hurt himself; he'd head-butted Ranma before, knowing it would hurt the pigtailed fighter much more than himself. The other Ryouga emerged from a cloud of dust, chuckling menacingly.

"This would have been more fun if Ranma had been here instead of you. Or maybe Akane or Ukyou…" The alien's sharp toothed smile seemed to grow even wider. "That way he can understand what we went through when we saw Akari torn apart… that look of impotent agony… I think it'd look good on him, don't you?!"

"If you have my memories at all…" Ryouga replied, disgusted by what he'd just heard. "You'd never go through with it. No one should go through that."

"Don't make me repeat myself, original." What it said next, it said with macabre seriousness, "I'm not you. Killing them… _would make me feel really good right now_."

Ryouga couldn't believe it. "They were your friends, too!"

The double scoffed. "They just used you. They're still using you. Even Akari… would she love you if you hadn't beaten her pet pig? Remember how she kept trying to tell you to train with her pets instead of by yourself? You were just a tool to make their family stronger."

"You're remembering now, aren't you?" It hissed behind clenched teeth. "'Ryouga-sama, why don't you teach that move to Katsu-chan?' 'Ryouga-sama, why don't you train with Mori-chan today?' 'Ryouga-sama, what did you think of the Banryu farm champion? Did you see any weakness we could train to exploit?' 'Ryouga-sama, I'm worried about your training. You're already so strong, why don't you spend more time teaching?'"

"You're twisting things…" Ryouga did remember those words. He hadn't thought about them in a long time, though. "She loved me."

"What do you suppose she'd have done if you refused to train her stupid sumo pigs? Would she still love you, even if you were hit by something like the Moxibustion?" The doppelganger shook his head, and breathed out a wisp of smoky black hate-filled _ki_. "No. She'd leave you. The only thing we're good for, the only thing the world wants out of us, is our strength. Human? Alien? There's really no difference."

Ryouga's hands balled into fists, tight enough to start to deform the gloves he wore. "Those are hollow words coming from something neither human nor alien."

"You think we're different?" The doppelganger just laughed. "You think you're human? Really human?"

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" the lost one snarled, but the hybrid him slipped back into the whirling clouds of dust. Ryouga chased after him, not wanting to wait for the next attack, but the doppelganger was gone. Sensing that he'd been left behind, he took a moment to check the motion detector mounted on his plasma carbine. After a little calibration, it had no problem filtering out the particulate clouds and white noise caused by the _Mettayatara Metsubushi_. His double was nowhere nearby, however.

Only moments later, he heard the tell tale sounds of plasma fire.

Without hesitating, Ryouga ran blindly towards the noise.

'Please! Please don't let me get lost!'

* * *

The fastest time on record for clearing a fully crewed alien battleship was officially eleven minutes and thirty four seconds, held by four squads from Duiwelskloof, South Africa. Not that Ryu was keeping track of the time, or that he really needed to beat that record, but he knew about it. He also expected to beat it by the end of today. He also knew that that Battleship had been crewed by Floaters. Taking down an Ethereal and Muton crewed Battleship in less than half that time, even if it was due to a cheap trap at the beginning, was one hell of an impressive feat. 

Again: not that he was rushing because of that…

They had been told to take the ship "with all due haste" after all.

"HAAA!" He had to be careful, though, even in his 'haste.' The case in point, and at the receiving end of his snap kick, was an alien he'd not encountered previously. It was called a Celatid, but to the ambitious young martial artist and soldier, it looked like a floating forty pound booger. Not that he planned to describe them as such in his reports, or to Ukyou when he caught up with her later, but the description was apt. Celatids were one of the non humanoid forms of alien XCOM was familiar with, looking like nothing more than a blob of pulsating flesh with no mouth or sensory organs of any kind.

It was dangerous, though, and he had to be careful in manhandling it. Celatids could excrete and project a spray or squirt of highly caustic chemicals. The technical name used in the UNETCO literature was "alkahest," so named because it was very nearly a universal solvent. It would dissolve almost any matter it came in contact with, including cocky XCOM troopers in personal armor. He'd been told repeatedly not to take the "acid spit" lightly and that it would kill as effectively as any plasma beam… but slower, and more painfully.

Which was why he hadn't hit the fat floating booger very hard. Not only did it have caustic blood, but a sack full of even more potent alkahest inside its body. Celatids could and did splatter pretty easily when hit by projectile weaponry, like cannons, spraying acid death in every direction. More than even the Chryssalid, it was not an alien to get into close quarters combat with. If you were fast enough or just plain lucky, you could avoid the "armor piercing wang" of the Chryssalid, as some troops called it. But Ryu wasn't keen on trying to dodge acid, or hitting something that had blood strong enough to burn away his hand.

The kick was soft enough to merely knock the Celatid against the wall. Ryu's plasma carbine took care of the rest. Plasma worked wonderfully on Celatids; the superheating of the blood caused by the plasma neutralized the most potent elements in the Celatid's "universal solvent." Ryu didn't know how, but he'd been told it did, and he trusted the source. A solid center of mass hit nearly disintegrated the stunned Celatid before what was left of the body exploded from the rapid internal rise in temperature. Carbonized fragments rained down, staining the walls of the UFO.

That took care of one of the room's occupants.

Ryu took an instant to check on Mint, glancing in the boy's direction, before heading for his original target in the room. The two of them had barged in on two Mutons and their little pet flying booger. One had been setting up a Blaster Bomb, and the other had been covering him. By unspoken agreement, he and Mint had hit the Mutons first. Mint was, in fact, still hitting his Muton.

Unlike Ryu, Mint was both a swordsman and weapon master. Fighting with him was sort of like fighting alongside Mousse, except while Mint was a good deal faster, he wasn't quite as versatile. Compared instead to Kuno, Mint's sword was not as powerful, but much faster. This didn't help terribly fighting against Mutons. The green skinned humanoids could survive taking a rocket propelled grenade to the chest. Mint's initial efforts to slice his target up weren't proving very successful.

Ryu swept one arm at his own enemy, unleashing a vacuum wave powerful enough to carve an iron Buddha in half. The Muton he'd initially attacked using his _Moko Kaimon Ha_ (Fierce Tiger Crashing Through Gates), and which was halfway back on its feet, took the attack straight on. The vacuum blade scratched the creature's organic armor, but didn't even draw blood. He'd expected more damage, but something about the Muton's outer carapace seemed to be making his cutting and piercing attacks less effective.

Still, it kept the big alien immobile, allowing Ryu to open up on it with his carbine. The Muton was quicker than its bulk would've indicated, however, and it avoided the second and third shots with speed and agility enough to impress an Olympic gymnast. Again: it shouldn't have been that surprising. Most aliens were already the equivalent of human Special Forces, and Mutons were the crack shock troops of the alien army. It was still odd, though. Ryu had thought his aim was spot on.

"Not fast enough, though!" Ryu said with a vicious smirk, firing another three round burst before ducking back enough to dodge a bit of return fire. The Muton was slow to die, even after three plasma rounds tore into its body. Lying on the floor, bleeding deep orange gore, it tried to return fire with a sidearm. Ryu danced out of its aim, kicked the weapon out of its hands, and followed up with a ruthless descending heel kick to the back of its head. To his amazement, the blow didn't cave in the alien's skull. It did prove the literal straw that broke the camel's back, however.

'Tough bastard…' Ryu turned to see Mint slam into his target at high speed, pinning the Muton against the wall.

"Stand back," Ryu began to say, "I'll…"

"No. You stand back!" Mint laughed, though it sounded more like a mischievous "hehehehe" instead of a proper sinister chuckle. Then his sword hand began to move. Not just a little, either. It quickly became less than a blur, as it moved a couple millimeters up and a couple millimeters down, in a rapid sawing motion. The Muton on the receiving end of the blade groaned, opening its mouth and showing teeth, as Mint's sword sawed into its chest.

Vibrating his hand at such a speed… Ryu had to give props where they were due. No one did speed like the little Musk kid. In seconds, he'd cut through the tough outer hide of the Muton, and broke through its rib cage with a sound like a chainsaw struggling to get through a particularly tough knot of wood. Not quite cutting all the way through, Mint tore his sword free and took a few steps back. The front of his armor was covered in blood, much more than before, but it all started to slowly slouch down like water off a raincoat. He was still a gory mess, though.

"I think you got him…" Ryu observed, as the Muton, a long gash sawed from its right shoulder down to its left waist, fell to its knees. Then, to the Kumon heir's surprise, it lifted its arm and started to reach for something: a fallen plasma pistol. Ryu quickly shot it for good measure, twice, in the head.

"This is Lime! We're pinned down near the Command Room!"

"Read you," Ryu responded, and quickly changed the clip on his plasma carbine. "We're on our way."

* * *

Of course he was lost. 

Not only was it basically impossible to see where he was going, but he couldn't make use of any audio or emotional cues either. His damned doppelganger hadn't just kicked up a cloud of blinding dust; he'd literally swallowed the entire battlefield in it. He could hear over the comm. that other XCOM troopers were similarly enveloped and forced to rely on thermoptics and re-calibrated motion sensors. He could hear the sounds of fighting, but only over the intercom. It made him anxious – emotional – and the more wound up he became, the easier he became lost.

"Command? What is my position? Where am I now?" he hoped he didn't sound quite as desperate as he thought he did. "Command? Command?"

"Be quiet for a moment, would you?" A familiar voice, but not the one he'd expected, entered his ear. "Boy, you are lost!"

"I was trying to get out of this… cloud…" he explained, but cut to a question just as quickly. "Nabiki, what the Hell are you doing here? Where's Rachael?"

"She was getting you even more lost than normal, so they forwarded you to me," Nabiki replied. "I've been briefed on the situation. We don't have a lot of time. Do what I say exactly when I say. And no back talk. Ok?"

'If it gets me back to the fight…'

"Roger that," he complied. "What you say; when you say."

"You know left from right, don't you?"

"Of course I know left from right! I'm not retarded!"

"Turn left. Thirty degrees."

He did.

"Turn right. Thirty degrees."

He did, though with growing annoyance.

"Damn! No wonder you're always getting lost!"

"Hey!"

"Ok ok…" Nabiki thought for a second. "Hold your right arm out. Straight in front of you. I want you to use your hand as a point of reference. Now: turn your head thirty degrees to the right. Now turn your head fifteen degrees to the left. Alright. This'll do."

Ryouga just frowned. There were few things he hated more than having his… family disability made fun of. Still, Nabiki was being less crass about it than he'd expected. It was awkward at first, holding his hand out, moving his head, and then running in that direction, but after a few seconds he barely thought about it. Instead, he just followed her directions.

"It's hard to tell where the fight is exactly," she noted after a minute of frenzied highway car-chase speed running. "You're getting close, though. Do you see anything?"

"No…" he looked around, but he also searched with his ears and with his battle intuition. Unfortunately, the latter often got him lost, too. His hearing was generally reliable, though. "I hear gunfire… plasma fire… but from multiple directions."

"Ok. Hmm." Nabiki paused again, thinking it over. "According to Keyhole Intel, that dust cloud is only about twelve meters high. I've seen you and Ranma jump onto the roof of Furinkan High, and that's four stories. Jump up, turn around, and let me take a look."

He actually tried jumping and looking before, but it hadn't helped. Still, he had promised to follow her directions without complaint or comment. Wiping away his visor and helmet sensors, Ryouga tensed his leg muscles and jumped. The dust cloud grew much thinner as he got higher, and a moment later, he crested the top of the cloud entirely. It was late twilight outside, still quite dark, and he could only linger at this height for a second or so. Spinning, using momentum from his initial jump, he turned around 360 degrees, and fell back down.

"Let's see here…" Nabiki muttered, and her voice faded away for a few seconds. "Ok. Ryouga – left fifteen degrees. Run!"

He did as ordered, shooting blindly through the dust and smoke.

"Stop!" She suddenly yelled. "You're almost there. It's stopped. Careful. There's friendlies up ahead, too."

He nodded imperceptibly, and cautiously raised his plasma carbine to his shoulder while keeping the muzzle directed down. Walking forward, trying to follow an invisible line set by his weapon's aim, he began to feel it. His _sakkijutsu_ was flaring up again, telling him he was _close_. His IFF Motion Detector registered two nearby friendlies up ahead, at a range of about ten meters. He still couldn't see or hear anything.

"Careful, Ryouga," Nabiki warned, her voice more intense than it had been before. It felt like she was almost there with him, side by side. Or maybe with her in front, since he couldn't find the way on his own. "Take a step to the right…"

He did.

"It's there," she all but whispered. "Stopped moving when you came close. But it's there. Be careful."

"What about the friendlies?" he asked, breaking his silence.

"There's… something wrong with them," Nabiki replied, sounding worried. "They might be dead. But… it's hard to tell."

Finally, they came into view, close enough to see the two prone bodies even through the thick dust cloud. It was two of the men from Irkutsk's Uniform Squad. Neither moved, but both seemed otherwise intact. Ryouga kneeled down, and cautiously reached for the closest body with his left hand. He had a Medikit, but doubted that he'd be given the opportunity to use it under these conditions, if, indeed, it would do any good at all.

The moment he touched the body, he _felt_ something strange about it. It only took a few seconds to realize what it was that he felt, not with his fingers, but with the extrasensory perception than came from Cologne's brutal breaking point training. It remained a fact that alien alloys (or 'exotic alloys') were immune to the breaking point, but UNETCO personal armor only used those alloys for part of the outermost layer. Beneath the alloy plates was a weave of conductors and coolant fluids inside an aerogel, and beneath that were two environmental layers, one of which also handled power channeling. It included hundreds of feet of fiber-optic and copper power line.

All of these had breaking points of varying complexity.

"No wonder…" he mused. His doppelganger had scrambled the personal armor's inner components, rendering them into a useless mess. With his target immobilized and unable to communicate with his or her peers, the other Ryouga had simply struck at vulnerable points with killing force.

"Figured it out yet?" a voice asked, from within the surrounding darkness. "I'm amazed you found me this quickly. Don't tell me that they **fixed** you, too?"

"What does he mean?" Nabiki asked, hearing every word.

"You bastard…" Ryouga stood back up, and faced the source of the voice. The other Ryouga, still garbed in the robes of an Ethereal, emerged. For a few seconds, the two glared at each other. Then the doppelganger's teeth parted and it laughed darkly.

"I don't curse you for killing my comrades," it said, and a bone studded hand slipped out of its robe. "Why curse me for doing the same?"

Ryouga instead changed the subject entirely. "You were wrong. About Akari. About everything."

"Oh?" it asked, still grinning.

"I did hate training those pigs," he admitted. "I did resent having someone question my training practices. I do wonder if… if she'd have given me the time of day, if I weren't a martial artist. Maybe it wasn't perfect, but I was happy. You have those memories, too, don't you?"

The doppelganger stood, silent.

* * *

THIS ONE IS UNSTABLE 

IT CAN NOT BE USED ANY MORE

IT IS CLOSE BUT NOT PERFECT WE MUST REFINE THE PROCESS

THE TESTS HAVE RUINED IT

He stood alone in the center of the chamber, blood dripping from his arms and running down his chin, chest heaving. Strewn about, in bloody pieces and broken bodies, were a dozen others just like it. There had been sixteen at first, each with different degrees of human and alien in their make up. Lying in a pool of blood, one looked entirely human. Yet another, torn in half at the waist, looked almost exactly like an Ethereal. Seven had been weeded out through science. Six had been weeded out through competition. In the center of it all, black ink colored _ki_ leaking out from between bloodstained teeth, the strongest survived.

THIS WILL NOT SUFFICE

OUR NEXT EFFORT SHOULD BE TO MODIFY THE ORIGINALS

AGREED

* * *

Cologne smiled slyly. "I've arranged a mission for you. Your first and last. I promise you'll find it interesting. Ranma may even be there. Or even Akane." 

"Ranma? Akane…?" he asked, looking past Cologne to the Ethereal Commander hovering nearby. He felt the mental constraints that had shackled his mind unlock. What began as a trickle of memory and emotion quickly turned into a deluge. His hands balled into tight fists.

"How do you feel?" she asked. "Well?"

Blood dropped from between his fingers.

"That's right…" Cologne said, stepping aside to let him walk out of the tiny room where he had been sequestered and kept for study. "It's a terror mission. So just act naturally. Do what you feel like doing."

* * *

"Those memories you cherish…" the doppelganger hissed; dark lapping curls of mental energy rising out from its body. "Fill me with _hate_." 

With a monstrous howl, it charged.


	75. Doppelganger III

"Those memories you cherish…" the doppelganger hissed; dark lapping curls of mental energy rising out from its body. "Fill me with _hate_."

With a monstrous howl, it charged. There was little point in trying to catch it in breaking points, or, apparently, in using the _shishi hokoudan_. With renewed determination, Ryouga crouched into a combat stance, and received his other self. Unlike before, it seemed to be slipping more and more into a berserker fury. Ryouga let his own darker emotions rise up to the surface, providing him with power.

This time, there was no attack and feint.

The two martial artists stood, face to face, and slugged away at each other's lives. His helmet, being very nearly a seamless assembly of alien alloys, actually proved to be the most resilient part of his armor to repeated blows. But he had to be careful and keep it from being torn off by the force of the blows. Without it, he'd be choking on dust in seconds.

Still, as they traded blows, Ryouga began to realize that while the doppelganger had developed some new moves, he fought in hand to hand much like Ryouga himself had several months ago. There was a difference in skill between them, honed by days of hard training and fighting between himself and other martial artists. He hadn't just been refining and developing special techniques since he'd joined UNETCO; he'd been improving in general skill as well.

Blocking a blow and seizing an opening, he planted a brutal crouching roundhouse, snapping the doppelganger's face back and sending a spray of blood into the air. Bringing his leg back down and around, he spun into a palm strike to the solar plexus. The other Ryouga flew back from the remaining force of the blow; the fraction of it that had overcome his stance and grounding. Landing on his feet and skidding for another meter or so, he held out his hands. Ryouga charged after him, unwilling to let him retreat back into the dust cloud all around them.

Seeing that his double left itself open, Ryouga struck with full force, nailing it in the throat. Flattening his palm, he then struck the doppelganger's _Migi Kiri_ Point with enough force to cut down a tree. Its left foot cratered the ground from the force of the body blow. Ryouga didn't relent – he brought his elbow up from the same arm that had struck the _Migi Kiri_ and hit the side of the double's head. It was only the set up for what came next: a tiger strike to the _shuigou_ ("water trough") pressure point in the midline of the nasal philtrum, 1/3 of the way from the nose to the edge of the upper lip. It was one of the body's most vulnerable points, and one that if struck properly, could cause instant death.

The doppelganger staggered back a step.

It was a blow that would have killed not just any human being, but almost any other martial artist. In all their fights, and for all their rivalry and brutality, he and Ranma had never tried to strike each other in a spot like the _shuigou_. For a moment, Ryouga wondered if the doppelganger had died on its feet. He'd heard of it happening: the body could move and fight for moments even after brain death.

Then it lashed out, grabbing him by the arm.

"Yuuten…"  
(Melting Point)

"Shit!" Ryouga jumped back, tearing his arm out of the hybrid's grip. He could feel his personal armor warp and distort around his left arm. The material burned red hot and expanded, crushing his flesh and bone against the outer layers of alien alloy. This was how those other men had been killed… or at least painfully immobilized. The pressure was incredible – almost unbearable. Before he could try and detach the left arm module of the armor, it split and heaved, tearing itself open.

Facing him, the doppelganger chuckled, wiping a trickle of blood off its curled lower lip. How it had survived the blow, Ryouga couldn't imagine. The only possibility was that it wasn't entirely human on the inside. Reaching up to his side, to the bandannas wrapped around his upper left arm, he retrieved a dozen. It was a long shot, but it didn't look like his opponent had much need for a bandanna of his own, given the lack of hair.

"That won't work either," the doppelganger warned, and then it patted its Ethereal robes. Ryouga tried anyway, loosing a dozen of the bladed bandannas. They looped through the air, circling and then plunging down into the hybrid Hibiki. Nine bounced harmlessly off the alien material; acting as it they had hit adamantine steel instead of billowing cloth. Two buried themselves in the creature's arms, but didn't cause it any apparent harm. It took a moment to look for the twelfth bandanna, and that was when Ryouga struck.

A line of breaking point explosions distracted and hemmed in the doppelganger, allowing Ryouga to _akichi_ into its defensive zone. It tried to move to defend itself, but when it did, it found itself unable to move. Ryouga smirked to himself. Of the bandannas he had thrown, he had detached a length of string from four of them. When they had looped around and circled the doppelganger, it had tangled him up in the thin lines of string. Now, under the effect of the _tetsununo_ "Iron Cloth" technique, that string was a wire strong enough to suspend a car in midair.

It was a move he'd developed to use against Ranma, but it would work well here, too. Inside his enemy's guard, Ryouga reversed the drop of the twelfth bandanna in his hand, and plunged it into his double's throat, between the jaw bones. He'd barely done so, however, before the double head butted him, and kicked him to the ground. Rolling back and onto his feet, he saw the hybrid break free; using the same brute strength he'd always prided himself on. Then, amazingly, it reached up to the bandanna impaling its throat, and tore it free.

Just as easily, it plucked out the bandanna's spearing its arms.

"Ryouga…"

He'd almost forgotten Nabiki was there.

"Yeah. I know," he cut her off, adjusting the TeamComm to make sure he couldn't be overheard. "Nabiki… I want you to make sure Lieutenant Tsuchihashi knows my position. If my vitals drop out, I want him to Blaster Bomb the entire area. Level everything."

Nabiki hesitated a second before answering.

"…Ok."

"I said I'd show you our differences, didn't I?" The doppelganger asked, wiping away some of the blood on its neck. Then it held out its hand; held it up to its mouth, and started to breathe. Dark black smoke drifted out from between its triangular teeth, but instead of billowing away, it began to collect in the hybrid's right hand.

Reaching behind him, Ryouga wrapped his hand around the grip of his plasma carbine. In his left hand, he began to build up energy. This alien human abomination knew his _shishi hokoudan_, and had knocked it aside before. If that was the case, he'd just have to make it less like a bullet, or even a wave, and more like a shotgun. He'd destroy everything in front of him, and shoot down whatever remained.

Inside his glove, his fingers bled as he pumped more and more mental energy into the technique. It didn't even hurt anymore, not after his training. Instead, he felt a parasympathetic numbness spread through his fingers, hand, and arm. Green flared into dark green, and then it grew brighter as he kept the orb from growing outwards. The color changed, turning mint and then white save for the jade tinted periphery. Flecks of discordant energy rippled out from his fingers, carrying away shreds of ruined armor.

In the doppelganger's right hand, a tiny black pin prick burned.

'How is he concentrating it so much?' Ryouga marveled.

* * *

"Ethereals and Sectoids have two special organs in their brains," Captain Ben-Solomon explained, holding up a device the size of his hand with a strange crystal set in the center. "These are the _ampullae psionic_ and the _corona lucis_. They are connected by a network of tissues called the _rete exertabile_. This system gives the aliens a natural ability to control their psionics that we can only emulate using technology, like this psi-amp." 

"However," the Captain warned, "Even with this, your greatest advantage will never be your level of finesse. Instead…"

* * *

"I see. Maybe I was wrong to think of you as human," Ryouga said, facing his doppelganger. 

"And I told you," it replied, holding out its hand, black _shishi hokoudan_ sending shockwaves through the dusty air as it strained to be let loose. "You're… almost as inhuman as I am."

With an echoed roar, the two fired.

* * *

A duet of explosions cleared out the corridor leading into the Command Room. There was only one entrance inside, with the hull of the battleship opposite the door, and only two approaches: the left and the right. It was a handy defensive bottleneck, but Ryu and Mint had caught the aliens by surprise. Rounding the corner, they saw a mauled alien corpse burning softly on the ground. Two alien plasma grenades had done their work on the Muton that had been keeping Lime and Kuno pinned down. 

"Follow up after we open the door. You know the drill," Ryu ordered, speaking to the two martial artists heading their way. "Don't bunch up. We're moving in four, three…"

They couldn't be as conservative in handling the Command Room, not with a possibly Blaster Bomb armed alien lying in wait. Flashbangs were out (they were of dubious effectiveness against aliens in general, anyway), and they'd been ordered to try and minimize damage to the battleship itself. That meant no short fuse plasma grenades where they could demolish sensitive equipment. Luckily, they'd come prepared.

As Mint opened the door, Ryu fired a stun grenade in through the crack before it had even fully widened. A heartbeat later, Mint did the same, firing another grenade from his carbine's underslung grenade launcher. The stunners were of alien design and manufacture, but XCOM had adapted them to more conventional use. With a little disposable shell and some minor modification, they could be easily fired from a standard grenade launcher instead of the bulky apparatus the aliens originally used.

With a muffled crack, the Command Room filled with purple gas.

Ryu was about to signal Mint to quickly close the door, when his eyes widened. Somehow, the Ethereal had gotten out of the room. His first instinct was to fire, but just before he did, he remembered his training.

"Tango!" "Tango!"

Ryu and the Ethereal pulled up their aim just as they fired. Plasma splashed into the ceiling, ran along it, and spread out in a messy fan all around them. Neither had been hit. It had been a close thing. The Ethereal – the real Ethereal – was fast.

"You ok?" Ryu asked.

"That was close!" The Ethereal replied, sounding rather exactly like Mint.

"Tricky."

"How did it do that so quickly?" Mint-as-an-Ethereal asked. They glanced at the now closed Command Room door. "To both of us?"

'It's good,' was the answer. Ryu frowned; the illusion wasn't dispelling, either, even though they'd both realized it was just a trick. None of their tutors had been able to project telepathic illusions this quickly. Abruptly, he remembered firing at the Muton earlier, and missing when he was certain he'd have scored a center of mass hit. And that wasn't the only instance.

'It's very good…' he realized. All this time, it had been using minor mental tricks to try and skew different fights in the aliens' favor. His armor had been blaring sporadic psionic warnings since they entered the ship, but that was to be expected. Simple proximity to an Ethereal (and sometimes a Muton, if it was receiving orders from an Ethereal) tended to set off the sensitive detector. It worked perfectly against Sectoids, but it wasn't as handy against Ethereals, who all used psionics all the damn time.

Ryu remembered what his instructors had said about telepathic, instead of telekinetic, attacks. While direct mind control was considered a fourth, separate, discipline, there were three broad and basic classifications: "Illusion" type, "Power" type, and "Trap" type. All were dangerous. Power attacks could kill you outright, wiping out your consciousness and turning you into a mental vegetable. Trap attacks were used to stun or immobilize you, often for abduction purposes, or to delay a powerful psionic opponent. Illusion attacks were used to cause panic, and make you a danger to those around you.

This one had almost worked, too.

"Wait. Where are Kuno and Lime?" Ryu asked, looking behind to where the other two should be coming. It had been much longer than five seconds. They should have rounded the corner as backup.

"Command! Situation Analysis, ASAP!"

Nothing.

Ryu slowly turned back, and Mint was gone.

"Well, this is just fucking wonderful!"

This was a high order Trap type telepathic attack. A bad one, too. Ryu fought down the urge to panic or move. If he did, he'd almost certainly end up running into the worst possible place, and either do something suicidal or shoot one of his comrades. He had to stay still and rationally examine the situation. Fear and Panic were the two things he had to avoid more than anything else.

What did he know?

They had opened the door. He had fired. Mint had fired. They had gotten back behind cover and closed the door. Moments later, both he and Mint were trapped in a telepathic _mandala_. Or was he just trapped in it? That was possible, too, but less likely. But where was Mint? Where were Kuno and Lime? Why wasn't command responding?

Ryu took a few deep calming breaths, though the air tasted and smelt strange.

'Focus!' he reminded himself. 'Focus. Stay calm. Don't do anything hasty. The Illusion itself is harmless. Do not panic. Do. Not. Panic.'

And then just like that, it was over.

The first thing Ryu noticed was that his helmet wasn't on. Blinking, he saw Kuno standing nearby. The kendoist motioned to his right, where Ryu saw Mint and Lime. The young Musk warrior had someone's helmet in his hands. Assuming this wasn't another illusion, that meant…

"Sorry," Mint apologized, and handed the helmet back. "I thought… it looked like you were…"

So he'd been tricked into removing the helmet?

Ryu quickly retrieved the invaluable lifeline, and put it back on.

"Command? India-2. Confirm, please."

Command replied promptly, "Command Confirmation 7821-9044. You're reading clearly. Intrusion at 0."

"Well…" Ryu let out a sigh of relief. "That was unpleasant."

"Do you believe the gas has had the required effect?" Kuno asked, staring at the door to the Command Room with open hostility. The whole episode, with the distorted sense of time and all, had only reinforced why XCOM had a policy of backup and conservatism when it came to anti-psionic warfare.

"No way to tell without looking," Ryu said, reloading his carbine's grenade launcher with another stun round. "Time for round two."

Kuno nodded, and he and Lime fell back again.

"You ready?" Ryu asked Mint. The younger fighter seemed rather shaken by the whole ordeal.

"I'm good," Mint replied, nodding. "I'm fine."

Ryu counted down with his free hand: 3, 2…

The door opened, and they immediately fired another two rounds. He ignored the fact that it looked like Mint was in the room, firing at him. Similarly, he could guess that Mint ignored a similar illusion. Even if it were somehow real, their suits were NBC resistant, and the worst that could happen was that they ended up stunned. Then, without warning, plasma fire rained down from inside the room.

"Get down!" Ryu yelled, spinning to find cover with his back to the wall. It was impossible to tell if all the shots were real or not, but either way wasn't worth the risk. Then a sudden flare of pain blossomed in his chest, and he looked down. He'd been hit? When? How? The burning sensation started to spread as blood ran down his waist and legs into a pool on the floor.

'No!' Ryu rejected it. 'There's no suit damage on my HUD. I couldn't have been shot.'

"Damnit… I've had just about enough of this…!" Forcing himself to stand, Ryu took a wide stance, and swept his arms. It was barely even a half hearted version of his normal _Kijin Dai Ran Bu_, but given the pain lancing through his body, and the size of the room, it would have to suffice. The Demon God Big Mad Dance filled the air with vacuum blades, tearing apart the cloud of purple gas, and ultimately impacting harmlessly against the walls of the room.

Immediately, the pain disappeared, and his vision cleared.

He heard footsteps (had it only been five seconds?), and saw the Ethereal Commander in the back of the room. If it was weakened by the stun grenades, it didn't show it, as it held one of Ryu's vacuum blades suspended in the air in front of it. The crescent wavered and twisted, but didn't implode. For the first time, Ryu saw the alien's face: it was a twisted thing, like all Ethereals, with one eye fused shut and another hideously glaring in his direction.

It began to raise the plasma pistol it held, wardingly, between it and the vacuum blade suspended in air. It was only at that moment that Ryu realized he had dropped his rifle when he had thought he'd been shot. His eyes darted back and forth, looking for it. Mint wasn't around either. Was this just another trick?

"Hyo!" A familiar aristocratic voice yelled, and a wave of solid air shimmered across the room, blasting away clouds of nearby gas in its path. "Shin Kokuzan!"

Ryu grinned, instantly recognizing the technique as the "New Sky Arc Decapitation" developed by a certain team mate of his. Kuno truly had improved along with the rest of India Squad. As arrogant and annoying as the kendoist was, he wasn't keen on being left behind by his peers. Anyone who thought four of the world's premier martial artists, training together almost non stop against a ruthless enemy, wouldn't improve had to be out of his or her mind.

The Ethereal Commander clearly tried to stop Kuno's attack, too, using its formidable telekinetic mastery. But taken together - the two attacks and the effects of no less than four stun grenades - were simply too much for even an Ethereal Commander. First Ryu's vacuum blade imploded against the creature's body, and then Kuno's blast of solid air slammed it hard into the wall. It hung there for a second before falling to the floor.

"Heh!" Ryu looked over to his side, where Kuno stood, sword drawn.

"An alien Commander," Kuno mused. "Among our elite cadre, I believe I am the first to lay claim to such a prize. It is fitting, is it not, my friend?"

"Your timing was good, I'll give you that," he replied. Behind Kuno, he could see Mint and Lime. It looked like they'd been separated just after firing into the room. He'd have to spend more time at the psi gym getting used to facing and ultimately breaking these high level telepathic illusions. He'd developed an effective anti-telekinetic defense using his battle aura. He wouldn't be caught flat footed the same way twice!

"Command. This is India-2," he took a few steps over to the Ethereal, and nudged it with his foot. "Battleship secured and intact, as ordered. We bagged an Ethereal Commander, too. Primary and Secondary objectives have been met. How's the situation outside?"

They answered him.

Ryu's eyes widened, and he pointed to Kuno. "Lime. Mint. Police the ship and get this Commander bagged and tagged. Kuno, you're with me!"

* * *

The east face of the building crumpled, raining broken aluminum panels and scattering steel rods and old equipment. Inside, wooden crates were neatly stacked in two long rows, up to twice the height of a man. The metal façade that had once made up one of the building's walls now let in tendrils of dusty air. Walking out of the soot, a titian colored form hopped through the hole in the wall and into the depot storehouse. 

"And another!" it yelled, snapping out its left hand.

A black bullet shot out from its palm, screaming through the air and hitting a small pile of rubble. When it did, the force of the impact sent debris flying in every direction, and one particular object skidding across the ground, into and through two wooden crates. Boxes of ammunition broke open, spilling thousands of rounds onto the floor.

A second later, a lance of green energy erupted like a geyser from across the storehouse, engulfing the cloaked doppelganger. Overhead, light bulbs shattered, while below, boxes tumbled like dust bunnies on the edges of the beam. The wall that had been deformed inward, deformed outward, and for a moment the air outside parted and cleared.

Shoving aside a forklift he'd plowed into, Ryouga lowered his hands. Between his fingers were eighteen spent rifle cartridges which he let fall to the floor. Slowly getting back up, he winced and cradled his side. At least half of his body armor was ruined, split and torn and cutting into his skin. Blisters ran up and down his left arm, flanked by a single long scrape that had sheared away enough flesh to leave bloody stains against whatever he leaned in. Worse: those black _shishi hokoudans_ he'd been hit by had caused some much more serious internal damage. He was coughing up blood, and he hadn't done that in a while.

Not that he terribly minded the injuries. He was pretty damn resilient, and the pain wasn't that big a deal either, but it **was** frustrating was hitting someone over and over and not doing much if any damage. That had never happened to him before. No one, no thing, had ever taken blows from him and just shrugged it off. Lime came close, but he didn't have the bizarre invulnerability this alien/human hybrid had.

"Ryouga! Just hold on! Ryu and Kuno are coming!"

"Are they?" he asked, but didn't doubt Nabiki. He wasn't sure either would be particularly helpful, though. Ryu was strong, very strong, but not strong enough. Maybe Lime… but even then, it was only a possibility. Ironically, Kuno, despite being probably the weakest member of India Squad (ok: he was), could cut through almost anything with his new sword. That is: if he got the chance. Kuno wasn't very quick…

A dark laugh came from outside, as the doppelganger stepped back through the hole in the wall – now wide enough to drive a small car through. He seemed to be plucking little pieces of metal out of his face and flicking them into the walls. Each one hit with a resounding 'clang' and deformed from the force. Craning its neck, it then spat a bullet out from inside its mouth.

"Using a ki attack to fire bullets?" it asked, and added, "Doing this reminds me of our Badinggong training."

Reaching up to its right eye, it plunged its fingers in and grabbed hold of something. Pulling its fingers free, it examined one of the spent bullets, flattened into a mushroom shape. Flicking it onto the ground, it started to advance towards him. Ryouga couldn't help but smirk; his copy sure wasn't making this _easy_. As for _Badinggong_, the shaolin exercise of plucking nails out of a wood plate, how could he forget? Those had been good times spent learning the Art!

'Improvisation really isn't my thing…' he thought, with a bit of annoyance.

Ranma was really good at improvising new moves and new special techniques on the fly, and perfectly adapting them to the situation even in the midst of battle. That was the scariest thing about Ranma: you could never tell what he'd think up next. Ryouga tried to be creative, too, but he wasn't half as good as his rival. He relied too heavily on preparation beforehand. It was exactly why he'd lost the _shishi hokoudan_ duel with Ranma at Furinkan, back then… he hadn't been able to think on his feet. He'd assumed he'd be able to just overwhelm Ranma with his perfected technique.

'Lost my carbine. Lost my sidearm. No grenades, either. Nothing's worked yet…' he observed, and quickly searched with his eyes for anything in the room he could use to his advantage. No eleventh hour miracle ideas came. 'All right! I'll just play to my strengths then…'

Putting his hands together, Ryouga took a few steps back. There was nothing he could put between himself and his doppelganger that would really stop it… aside from space. And his double didn't seem to be in a hurry anymore. Black smoke began to billow out of its mouth and down into its hands, forming two more black _shishi hokoudans_. A sweatdrop rolled down Ryouga's temple as he licked away a bit of blood left on his lower lip.

Closing his eyes and locking his hands together with only his index fingers pointing upwards, he focused his thoughts, just like they'd taught him at the psi lab. It was doubtful that he'd be able to pull off a convincing illusion attack against an alien human hybrid, much less one of himself, but that was ok. Even if he did nothing but concentrate, it would probably cause the doppelganger to pause and check its own mental defenses.

It wasn't the real target anyway.

It took all of a second, but in that second, the self-induced delusion dredged up every painful memory, every miserable moment, every feeling of hopelessness and suicidal depression; every curse and scream and tear he could remember shedding. In that second, the memories formed a kaleidoscope of soul crushing misery. Ryouga's battle aura constricted, retreating into his body, before exploding outwards four times larger than before.

A ragged breath left his mouth, and tears streaked down his face. He'd practiced this before, at a lower level, but he'd never gone all the way with it. It hurt more than any physical wound ever could. He let out another choked gasp, and his battle aura expanded even more. The depressive _ki_, the heavy _ki_, grew thicker and stronger than ever before. Rows of stacked wooden crates shattered under the pressure.

It was time for the Final, Perfect version of the _shishi hokoudan_.

He was half way through gathering the ki, forming the move, when the doppelganger rushed through the battle aura. The weight of it slowed the hybrid down, but not enough. A black orb of energy shot out from one of its hands, and Ryouga had to dodge or risk taking the shot to the chest. His concentration on the perfect _shishi hokoudan _wavered, releasing the pent up energy as a massive shockwave and a fountain of unfocused _ki_. The former shattered what was left of the equipment in the storehouse, while the upward eruption literally tore the roof off its supports.

The next thing he knew, the doppelganger's other hand was on his left shoulder. The black orb of energy it held in its hand dug into his flesh and tore away already ruined armor. Instead of exploding, however, it twisted and tore straight through before exploding out the other side of his body. Ryouga spun from the pain and the force, but kept on his feet. This close, he had a chance…! With his left hand, he plunged his fist up, holding what he had hoped to be his trump card. His belt, hardened to the strength and sharpness of a sword, and with Ryouga's strength behind it, entered the doppelganger's lower torso.

"…"

The inhuman hybrid stared at the blade impaling it, and at the tip that was now just sticking out of its left shoulder, having slipped between its ribs and its clavicle and scapula. It was an almost perfect strike: spearing or slicing the lungs, heart, and liver. For a few seconds, they stood there, neither moving or saying a word.

Then:

The doppelganger drew back its hand, fingers flattened into a spade.

"What do you think I am? Human?!" And with that, it stepped forward and plunged its hand towards Ryouga's chest. Only a last millisecond block deflected the killing blow, sending it down and into his midsection. Bone studded fingers tore through flesh and sinew, deeper and deeper into his body.

"Now…" it reached for his helmet, just under the chin. "Let's see what we look like, so close to death!"

Tearing the helmet off, it saw itself as it was in its memories. The thought of it, of that past, of those people, only sent another spike of rage through its inhuman mind. How it hated this original that Cologne and the others thought they could turn. How it hated being created having such a useless and painful past. How it hated the human emotions that corrupted its thinking, but that provided it with power! Black hate leaked out of its mouth; so filled to the limit was its body and mind with that burning, all consuming emotion.

Ryouga vomited blood and bile, splattering the doppelganger's face.

It just laughed. No amount of human physical training could fight off the effects of blood loss. No human was tough enough to survive for long with a hole in their abdomen. The doppelganger's vicious grin deepened as it pushed a little harder, driving its hand deeper into Ryouga's body, almost to the spinal column.

"Ryouga!" a someone cried, barely audible outside the helmet in its other hand. It took a moment, but the hybrid recognized the voice. Bringing it closer to its face, it took a tentative look inside and at the HUD, which was still active.

"Nabiki," it said, but didn't see a video feed. "So that's where you've been…"

"Let him go!" he heard her cry. "Or we'll destroy that entire area!"

"Do it now," Ryouga snarled. "Fire, now!"

"No! You're still alive! Ryu and Kuno…"

"They're coming," the doppelganger cut in. "I know. Those two, I'll kill quickly. They don't have anything to do with this… and neither do you, Nabiki."

"St…!" she never got a chance to reply, as the doppelganger pulled the plug, disconnecting the helmet from the suit and tossing it away.

"Now…" it paused, as a hand reached up and seized it by the throat. "Choking me? How stupid. I've been designed to survive in a vacuum."

Ryouga's grip was weak, too weak to effectively choke anyone anyway.

"You never had what it took to kill me," the double continued, digging its hand a little deeper still. "Not after you lost your weapons. It wasn't that you were weak, that you lacked power or skill… you're just too human. As for me… my humanity is only skin deep…! Cut me. Slash me. Break me. All useless!"

Slowly, Ryouga looked up at him, eyes narrow and defiant.

"So you don't believe your eyes?" The hybrid asked, and it grabbed a handful of viscera. "Well then… your broken body will feel the truth instead!!"

It began to pull when a burning sensation started to build, not within its victim, but within itself. Half dead, Ryouga's battle aura remained, flickering weakly within its own. The doppelganger could feel pressure building up inside itself as it got hotter and hotter. It didn't, couldn't, really feel pain… not in a human sense of the word, but it did know discomfort and distress. Something was wrong with its body. It hadn't been stabbed or broken or beaten. This was different. Almost like…

* * *

"Ryouga-sama…" 

He stood, once more, at the shore of the river Sanzo. How often had he been here, he wondered? How often had he been on the verge of death, watching, with envy, the dead on the other side. He could see Akari there, on the other side, and the shadows of his grandparents. It was so peaceful here, by the river, just waiting to cross.

"Akari-chan," he whispered, but he knew she could hear him. "Akari… I…"

_For a few seconds, she started at him, and then briefly at Ryu. He could see how his words bounced around in her mind as she thought more about it, and tried to assimilate it. She didn't become discouraged, like a part of him had feared. She learned. She kept trying. And it impressed him._

_And he wished he'd seen this side of her a year ago._

_"Good match," Ranma finally offered. They'd had to delay breaking in the new Dojo for a day, but it had been worth it. Ranma grinned broadly. "Good fight!"_

_ Ryouga nodded. "Good match, Ranma. Good fight."_

_"This isn't over until he cries uncle!" Mousse stomped on the back of Kuno's head again, and grinded his foot savagely. "Give up, Kuno! You're a ten years too early to be challenging the likes of me!"_

_ "Roguish vagabond! None may tread upon the head of Tatewaki Kuno!"_

_"But here," Konatsu spoke with genuine happiness. "Here, I am doing something that is just… and right. I'm making a difference, and I'm part of something gratifying. For the first time in my life, I think I'm doing something my parents would have been proud of. That makes me proud, too, and I don't mind if I don't have the spotlight. I wouldn't even know what to do if I were thrust into it."_

_"India Squad isn't Juliet Squad," he said, as if sensing her churning ki. No: he did see it. And he felt it; too, resonate more and more with his own. "Am I right?"_

_Ryu's own spiritual pressure was more restrained, but promised the same level of carnage. "Don't think you'll last long here if you aren't willing to fight with all you've got. When we hammer down a nail, it never sticks back up!"_

_Tetsuya frowned, but nodded in approval. "You'll give 'em Hell. I know you will. Hibikis may forgive, but we don't forget."_

_"Kasumi," he gasped, trying to ward her off with the backs of his hands._

_"It's alright, Ryouga-kun, it's alright," she said softly and leaned in, resting her forehead against his._

_"Time is an investment, too, in both business and friendships," Nabiki said, and far more succinctly and accurately than he'd have been capable of himself. "And we are your friends, Ryouga-kun. So waste some time with us, ok?"_

_"Ryouga," Mitsuko said, with that other strangeness now over. "Welcome back."_

_He stared at her for a second before smiling honestly. "Glad to be back, mom."_

_"You're acting like an idiot," she snapped, her normally stentorian angry tone of voice unusually subdued. "Don't you ever want to be anything except angry? Anything but bitter? You can't live like this!"_

_His shoelaces tied, Ryouga finished buttoning up his shirt, and silently threaded a plain black tie around the neck of his shirt._

_"I know about Akari, about how it happened," Akane persisted, after his lack of a response. "And I'm sorry. We've all lost people we knew, but you lost someone you loved. I know it hurts, but don't be like this. I know you'd be happy to help me, you already have with my training, but the one who really needs help is you. You, Ryouga-kun!"_

_ "You're probably right," he admitted, with disturbing calmness. "But I can't fight my way to the stars with depression. They won't let me. But anger. Hatred. They don't have as much of a problem with those things. To live with myself…"_

* * *

Ryouga's grip tightened; fingers digging into flesh. 

"The truth," he growled, one hand on the doppelganger's throat, the other keeping him from pulling his hand out of the gaping wound in Ryouga's midsection.

"Is that…" The double's hand came up, trying to pry his hand off its throat.

"Things have changed!" Pulse after pulse of _ki_ shot up Ryouga's arm in a steady rhythm, visible to the naked eye as it rippled over his skin. The doppelganger began to squirm, body convulsing as the mental energy broke down and infiltrated its battle aura, pouring directly into its nervous and circulatory systems. As the dissonance reached its brain, its connection to the Mind faded, and it made a hoarse, pained howl.

"Nothing… has changed!" It roared, and seized Ryouga in an identical grip. "I've been watching you… and Cologne, and all the others! I'm no dead end! It wasn't all for nothing! I'm the **future**! I'll prove it right now!"

Its mouth widened, not just a little, but enough to part the cheeks. Ryouga gritted his teeth and squinted hard; he could feel bits of dust from the _Mettayatara Metsubushi _technique creeping into his mouth, up his nose, into his eyes. His double roared as its veins began to bulge and burst, jets of crimson hued steam breaking the surface of its skin. Its voice broke as its eyes exploded - poisonous black _ki_ and boiling steam mingling in a fevered hellstorm around the two fighters.

Even as the free water in its body boiled away, it still stood, still fought. Its grip was like a vice, and Ryouga's throat was starting to give way under its insane pressure. He was weak from blood loss, and it was draining his superhuman durability and constitution. All his spare energy had to go towards stabilizing the wound in his stomach and directing _ki_ into the water in his double's body. Then his leg gave out, and he fell to one knee with a painful crunch.

The doppelganger loomed over him, its grip on his throat never slacking; burning flesh and hollow eyes not even giving it pause. Then, finally, as its brain began to cook inside its skull, its howl began to fade. Through his hands, and on his throat, Ryouga could feel how hot the doppelganger's body had become: hot enough to scald or burn almost anyone touching him.

I

The disjointed thought cut into Ryouga's mind.

I WON'T

DIE

SHE

won't

want

me

And just like that, the gathering dust clouds fell harmlessly to the ground in a downpour of sand and soot. The night sky became visible again through the lack of a roof, and the moon hung clearly against a sea of stars. Batting away the double's hand from his throat, Ryouga fell to his other knee as he tried to remove the arm that was still impaling him.

"I…" he whispered, staring down at the wound no human being could have survived for this long. The world darkened as he fumbled for his Medikit.

"I don't want to die either…"


	76. Right Now I

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. Despite a surge of activity in the Far East theatre, and fierce battles waged to unseat the Sirius Conspiracy and avenge the loss of the Joketsuzoku village, UNETCO and the two new squads have prevailed time and time again. With the threat of Cologne and other second generation Trenchards (alien human hybrids) looming ahead, the high command readies for a strike at one of the planet's last remaining alien bases. For India and Juliet squads, confrontation with these corrupted master martial artists is inevitable.

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia**

Chapter XXVI

_Right Now_

* * *

Written by:

Capn Chryssalid

* * *

Kasumi checked the monitor on Squaddie Washington's condition.

Just like before, his prognosis was steadily deteriorating; he had held on for a few days, but they were slowly losing him. Looking up from the diagnostic screens and into a tall translucent tube that rose up from the floor almost to the ceiling, she saw him floating motionlessly, suspended in oxygenated fluid. He was African-American, from Seattle, according to his chart and medical history. One of the new recruits, he had just recently shipped over from basic retraining in the States. After seven years in the military as a Navy SEAL, he'd spent two weeks at Fry Canyon, and then two days at Seiran Mountain.

Physically, there didn't seem to be anything wrong with the man. He was and continued to be in excellent physical condition - the problem wasn't the body; it was the mind. Prior evaluation at Fry Canyon had indicated a psionic strength rating of only 42 cEBMs, with a margin of error of two points. This was skirting the bare minimum that UNETCO required in recruits expected to face basic psionic warfare threats. Like sharks smelling chum in the water, the aliens had sniffed out Squaddie Washington's vulnerability, and closed in for the kill.

On his very first mission, no less.

There was substantial brain damage, now, caused by the alien as it fled his mind after turning him against his squadmates. Tests had indicated that Washington was still caught in a psionic trap of some sort, unable to regain consciousness or even normal synaptic function. Kasumi had heard one of the doctors call it a "persistent psionic infection" that paralyzed the mind and slowly destroyed it from within. They had attempted several techniques, including electroshock, a drug regimen, and psionic stimulation, all in an attempt to break the altered mental state the Squaddie was in. They had slowed the degeneration, but that was all.

Kasumi never knew him; she had never even seen him before he had been wheeled into the critical care ward, but she felt a tremendous sadness for him. Curled up in a fetal position, all alone in the medical alcove, battling with an untreatable inner demon… it was all in his hands, now. XCOM's medical science had progressed by leaps and bounds, thanks to the alien technology they had appropriated and modified, but the intricacies and subtleties of the mind often remained tauntingly and tantalizingly out of reach.

They still had so much to learn before they could rival their alien foes…

Kasumi took a moment to record his status, taking note of his brainwave patterns, regions of brain activity and the layout of his overall Ego Barrier. It was all sent and backed up in the CCW medical server, in case one of the doctors needed a detailed analysis of the patient at any point in time, but it was still standard procedure to personally monitor the critical patients routinely, and manually record their progress. Research had shown that human contact often had an unexpected and positive effect on recovery. Her work done, she toggled the capsule's tint feature. The transparent alien alloy darkened, giving the man some privacy. The effect was purely one way; if Squaddie Washington woke up, he would be able to see outside perfectly clearly.

The CCW was divided into three sections: isolation, recovery and quarantine. Quarantine was a small room with transparent exotic alloy walls and a small airlock. It went mostly unused, except occasionally when alien or alien-human hybrid subjects were present. Isolation housed the alcoves where the critically injured could be suspended in solution, like Squaddie Washington. The tubes were based on alien designs for incubation and maturation chambers – cloning technology, basically. Within the chamber, rapid cellular growth and metabolism could be stimulated and controlled; healing traumatic wounds, stabilizing one's physiology, and other general effects, all while being monitored in real time. Lastly, there was the largest of the three areas: the recovery ward. Patients no longer needing isolation in a medical alcove were then moved there to recover normally.

Kasumi headed towards one bed in particular, parting the privacy screen.

She had expected him to still be unconscious, but Ryouga was plainly up and awake. To her relief, he hadn't moved or jarred any of the nearby equipment. He was just lying in bed, looking up and breathing normally. An intravenous drip hung nearby, along with the automated monitoring equipment. It operated in total silence, content in the status of its current patient. No doubt he had been aware of her presence the moment she had entered the CCW door, even though the privacy screen, but only when she came closer did he loll his head to the side and acknowledge her.

"Kasumi," he said, simply, and raised his left hand in greeting.

"Ryouga-kun, you're awake?" she asked, and quickly checked the computer for his status. He let out a deep breath and went back to staring at the ceiling while she did so. According to the diagnostic equipment, he was fine. At least for the most part.

"I'd like to check your blood pressure, is that alright?"

He nodded, and she reached over to check the thin test bladder around his arm. Making sure it was in place, she activated it: it tightened, expanded slightly, and held that form for a short time. It would automatically deflate after taking a series of readings.

"You know," Ryouga spoke up, sounding unexpectedly sedate and relaxed. "I never thought too much about it, but one of the things I used to love about fighting Ranma at the Tendo Dojo was waking up and seeing a room over my head, light streaming in through a window, and…. this faint smell, like flowers or something. Our house, my house, was always empty and dusty. But your house was so… well cared for. It always felt good to be in a place people cared for… to know you're not alone. I think I cried, once, when I woke up to the smell of your cooking."

Before she could reply, he sighed and faintly smiled. "Thinking about it now, I really should have savored those moments more, before I went back to making myself unwelcome by fighting with Ranma or trying to get Akane to notice me."

"You were always welcome among us, Ryouga-kun," Kasumi replied, touching his left shoulder very gently. Like much of his body, it was bandaged in some place or another.

He didn't know it, but his words had filled her with a palatable sense of warmth. He had always seemed like such a nice boy, and always so helpful when Ranma and Akane weren't around to distract him (and when he wasn't P-chan), but she had never thought that he had become to emotionally invested in the Tendo home. For someone without a real home of his own, though, it must've seemed like a haven, and it was nice to hear someone recognize and appreciate the effort she put into it. She even blushed a bit, realizing that she had likely brought the smell of flowers into the medical ward, too, since it was probably her he smelt before.

"Ranma always had so much fun during your little fights," she reminded him, smiling at the fond memory. "And you know Akane always thought of you as a good and valued friend."

He reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose. "Only you would call them 'little fights' Kasumi. I can think of a few times we almost leveled Ranma's high school. As for Akane…" he trailed off, unwilling to continue.

She checked the blood pressure reading and frowned just a little.

"Still a little high…" she mused, but then again, Ryouga's blood pressure was always a little higher than normal. It was true of all the martial artists on base. Pulling out and folding out a chair from near the wall, she sat down next to him. The Akane thing was also partly the source of her downcast look, but they'd gone over that situation quite a few times before.

"Ryouga-kun," she said, and smiled warmly. "How do you feel?"

"How do I feel?" he repeated, with a sigh, and his arm fell back against the bed. "I feel like I'm pumped full of pain killers. Didn't I say 'no pain killers?'"

Kasumi shook her head; it didn't work quite like that. "Doctor Yoganathan didn't want you going into shock. Given your condition, Doctor Pearson agreed."

"Well," he replied, shrugging just a fraction against the pillow supporting his head. "It isn't like I enjoy pain, but I can't concentrate on healing myself when I can't feel where I'm hurt."

With a wince of discomfort, Ryouga pushed himself to sit up on the bed, cradling his side. He was wearing a medical gown and boxers, and peeling away the thin fabric of the former and a piece of gauze, he carefully ran his middle finger over the exposed scar that ran across his midsection. Black stitches still held it together, but it was one of the few scars he had after a lifetime of fighting. Kasumi could guess that most of those were from when he was younger, before he had mastered meditative _ki_ healing techniques.

There were smaller bandages here and there, in several places, but he focused next on his shoulder. Unbeknownst to her, the doppelganger had fired a black _shishi hokoudan_ right into his body there. Peeling away the gauze and tape, they could see a patch of pink flesh, mostly healed over but still slightly twisted and ragged looking. Kasumi watched, a knot of worry in her stomach, as he tentatively probed the wound with his finger.

"Ryouga-kun…" she started to say, to convince him to lie back down.

"It looks a little like a bullet wound," he noted with a mixture of curiosity and resignation. "A big one. But worse. I can't really feel how deep it is, though."

Kasumi knew. She'd been there when he came out of surgery and the doctors had put him in one of the medical alcoves. His injuries had been horrific. The telekinetic wound on his shoulder had gone clean through, tearing muscle but at least leaving bone intact; he had suffered similar, but less intense wounds to his chest, left arm and right leg; his lungs had started to fill with fluid by the time he got back to base; there was some kind of grit accumulated in his sinuses, the corner of his eyes, and even his ears; worst of all, it looked like he had halfway committed seppuku. There had been a ragged tear punched into and straight through the muscle of his abdomen, along with extensive internal hemorrhaging. Luckily, field administration of an ATRISK medikit had sealed the wound and saved his life.

To her relief, he quickly gave up trying to examine his injuries and instead fell back onto the bed.

"Nothing to do but wait, I guess," he muttered, and then turned his head and raised his voice to ask, "What about my squad? And the mission?"

"Everyone's fine," she assured him. "I don't know the details, but I've heard things went off well… all things considered."

Ryouga closed his eyes and nodded.

"Yeah," was all he said in reply. Kasumi knew there had been casualties on this mission, too. It hadn't been anyone from Seiran, though. The fact that lives had been lost seemed to weigh unusually heavily on the lost boy, and she was tempted to indulge her curiosity and ask why. By all accounts, Commander Yasuda had been pleased with his India Squad performed.

"Is something wrong?" she asked instead.

"I… I don't know," he admitted, exhaustion creeping into his tone of voice. "Yes, I guess. But I actually feel… better… in a way. Which I shouldn't." He closed his eyes again, and kept them shut for a few seconds. "They say a man is born with seven enemies, but I never figured I'd be one of my own."

Kasumi wasn't quite sure what to say to that. She'd heard similar expressions before, about men and their enemies, but most of the men she knew tended to say purposefully exaggerated or overly dramatic things anyway. She didn't think any of them really took it seriously. It made her feel good to know, though, that he could speak so freely around her. It may have been a little selfish, but it felt good to be needed again. It reminded her of home, and how all her hard work would be rewarded by the smiles and happiness of her family, and how she helped to heal that hole in their lives left when mother died. She knew from experience that things tended to get crazy around the Tendo home when she left, even for a few days.

Before she could think of anything to say, Ryouga suddenly started to laugh. It wasn't a sinister snicker, or a self-depreciating chortle, or even a crazy 'I finally beat Ranma! bwahaha!' It was a soft, contented chuckle, of the sort she couldn't recall hearing from him before. Reaching up to his face, he ran his hand through his unkempt hair, brushing it to the side in lieu of having no bandanna to keep it in place.

"I feel good…" he finally said. "Yeah. I… I feel better now than I have in a long time. I do want to live." For him, the simple statement seemed almost like a revelation. "I have people… people I want to live with. Gods! I want to see Kuno find a girlfriend who can actually put up with him. I want to see Ryu's dojo. I want to see Ranma and Akane… I want to see them happy. I want to see Ukyou rebuild her shop. I want to be there when we win this war…"

"You will be." Kasumi took his hand, and through it she could feel his aura. It still leaked out of his hands, but it didn't feel as threatening as it had before. It felt cool and powerful, like the waves of an ocean washing over and retreating from the shore as she stood, barefoot, on the beach. The power was all there, but it was, at least for the moment, at some measure of peace.

"I know it," she stressed, and smiled back at him.

"You've… really helped me a lot, Kasumi. Just having you around to talk to…" He smirked and looked up at her. "I think you were right, before. Maybe I will talk to Doctor Phillips."

"That's great, Ryouga-kun!" She'd been hinting and gently pushing for him to actually talk to (as in genuinely talk to) the base physiatrist for some time, so it was a relief to hear him say that he was going to do just that. She wasn't quite sure why he disliked psychiatrists in general so much – Doctor Phillips seemed like a nice enough man to her, after all – but it would be good for him to unburden himself on a professional. She could sooth his moods to some extent, simply by being herself, by listening to him, and by some minor holistic medicine she had learned from Doctor Tofu, but none of it got to the root of his problems.

"Kasumi…" his grip loosened a fraction. "Do you know what a killing move is? What it means?"

She tilted her head slightly in surprise and confusion. 'A killing move?'

"Most of your techniques would probably kill someone…" she began.

"No. No, I mean…" he let out a deep breath. "I mean a move that _only_ kills. I can pull a punch, make it weaker, or even use a ki attack with much less force. And even a sword can cut but not kill. A true killing move can only kill, no matter your intent, every time."

His expression hardened, becoming less readable. It looked like he was either sad, or angry, or determined, or some combination of all three.

"I did it," he said, and paused for a few seconds. "They say one's martial art reflects oneself, and heaven forgive me, but I actually did it. I've been working on it for two years… a 'killing point.' Satsugai Tenketsu. Now I have it, and… and I sort of wish I didn't."

For a moment, Kasumi was speechless. Then she saw the connection: she knew about the breaking point, about the duel with Ranma, and realized that Ryouga must have originally expected the technique to work on his opponent, and not just on inanimate matter. Later, he had made the best of it, and eventually learned the more effective _shishi hokoudan_, which he could and did blast Ranma with directly. If he meant that he had a literal 'killing point' in his power, it meant he had what he'd always wanted. But what did that say about him as a person? That he sought the power to destroy his enemies, and **only** destroy them?

"Ryouga-kun," she said, thinking over the implications of all he'd left unspoken. "If you have this power, then I know you'll use it wisely, and with restraint. You've… you've hurt people before. Killed them. But you're a good person. You are. Even when you try not to be."

She knew about P-chan, about the men he'd killed earlier in the month, even the shameful stories about people he'd accidentally hurt when he was younger and had even less control than he had when he first found Nerima. He'd told her about how he'd hoped to really and truly destroy Ranma's happiness in Nerima, about how he had wanted to kill him for so long it felt like it was the only thing he had to live for. He told her about the koi rod, and about how it felt to use anger and depression so powerful that he could mold it between his hands.

But for all that, she'd seen his kindness and loyalty to those he felt close to. She knew Ranma, object of so much anger, trusted his rival like a best friend. She knew about how Ryouga had defended Ranma, how he had risked his life to protect his friends and allies, about how he tried to help people and do the right thing during his travels. He'd saved them during that terrifying night in October, and when it looked like they were doomed to crash into the ocean, he put his life and body on the line to save them. At the worst, he was ruthless towards his enemies but unflinchingly loyal to his friends.

No: he was no saint; in the end, he was simply human.

"Hearing you say that…" his gripped her hand tightly, though with only a tiny fraction of his strength. "Thank you."

'Thank you for believing in me,' she could sense he meant.

"What day is it, anyway?" he asked, relaxing again. Her hand slipped out of his, and he sunk into his pillow. "How long was I out?"

"December twelfth," Kasumi replied, also leaning back in her chair, though it wasn't particularly comfortable. "You were under sedated care for two days."

"Two whole days?!"

"Ryouga-kun," she chided. "Most normal people with your wounds would be out for a week or more. That accelerated healing you and Ranma and the others have seems to scale upwards."

He laughed. "Is that so?" he asked with another quiet chuckle. "That's some interesting news at least! Anything I miss over the last few days? And how's Shirokuro?"

"Well…" Kasumi demurely touched a finger to her lips as she checked off the recent events he'd slept through. "There was a party on Friday to celebrate Akane's first successful mission…"

"Oh!" Ryouga snapped his fingers. "I can't believe I missed that! How was it?"

"It was smaller than the one you guys had; Ranma and his squad had to leave Friday night on a mission, and without you there either most of our close friends were gone. Akane was worried about you, you know. And when he heard about your condition, father couldn't stop worrying about Akane's safety. Your mother and Akane came to check on you, but…"

"But?" he inquired, curious.

"Well, once she became aware of your state of…" Kasumi blushed, and tried not to make it obvious by looking away. "Undress… well!"

Ryouga groaned, and sunk a little under the sheets in embarrassment. "Great!"

"She still checked in though. And don't worry," Kasumi smiled at the lost boy in a coy way. "She didn't see anything."

"To be honest," he mumbled; a creeping blush of his own on his cheeks. "I did see you girls naked before, so…"

He trailed off, so Kasumi didn't mind interjecting.

"You know, that's exactly what Nabiki said," she observed, and noted the blanching color of his face. "She didn't get to see anything either."

The lost one breathed a literal sigh of relief.

"It isn't what you think," Kasumi added, defending her younger sister. "Nabiki may joke about it, but she was worried, too. She's been helping to take care of Shirokuro, you know. They still won't let your mother off the base, so Nabiki took her for her walks outside."

"…Nabiki did, huh?" Ryouga thought about that for a while, and Kasumi wondered why the news seemed to surprise him.

Nabiki was a good girl. Well, in the same sense that Ryouga was a good man. Where he had that unfortunate ruthless streak, she had a bit of (mostly harmless) maliciousness and pettiness. Where he often let his emotions get the best of him, she often let money and avarice handicap her. She had no doubt that many thought Ryouga a bad person; and probably even more who found Nabiki to be cruel and manipulative. They had both done some questionable things in the past, but to Kasumi, they were both basically good people.

So she couldn't resist adding a sisterly, "I think she likes you, Ryouga-kun."

"Now that's a joke!" he scoffed, but his embarrassed blush came back a shade lighter. "Nabiki and I just have some similar interests and ambitions. That's all."

"I'm sure that's it," she assured him, thoroughly amused by his discomfort. Nabiki was right – he was easy to tease, not that she planned to make a habit of it! She was much too _nice_ to do anything like that. Regardless, compared to the boys Kasumi had seen her date in high school Nabiki did seem to be a lot more considerate where the lost boy was concerned. Maybe it was just that she saw Ryouga as more of a long-term investment in professional terms. Nabiki had never tried to have a job when she was younger, so Kasumi wasn't sure how she dealt with coworkers she actually respected.

"Ryouga-kun, I would like to make one thing clear before I forget," she said, putting more than a little authority into her voice.

He quickly held up his hands in a warding gesture. "I told you! It's just professional!"

"Not that," Kasumi continued, fighting back a smile at his reaction. "I wanted to remind you not to do any training or to try and leave the medical wards. Not until the doctors clear you for it. And no training means no pinky-pushups or other physical activity!"

Lowering his arms, his mercurial mood turned calm again.

"What?" he asked, surprising her with the question. Seeing he caught her off guard, he then added, "What makes you think I'd try and train with my guts held in by stitches and skin grafts?"

"Well… I know you and Ranma, and how you train even when you're hurt…"

"There's hurt, and then there's 'recovering from life threatening injuries,'" he said, and went back to lying down. "I know when to train and when not to. Don't worry about it. So! What else happened over the last few days?"

"Well, I did hear about this little thing between Ryu and Ukyou…"

* * *

He found her clothes first, draped carelessly over the mottled branch of an alien plant. Only a moment later, he saw (or rather: perceived, for his eyes were long gone) another identical robe, this one folded neatly on the floor, near several articles of _human_ clothing. At that moment, an inhuman howl from deeper within the garden complex chose that moment to rise in pitch and force before sputtering out. It certainly sounded angry, but he supposed that was to be expected. It was only natural for a creature to resist being caged.

The activity had also attracted some unexpected guests from elsewhere in Cologne's preferred gardens. The man formerly known as Doctor Tofu watched as a black shadow moved, revealing one of the facility's many Chryssalids. It peered ahead with tiny blue eyes, like a horseshoe crab's eyes, the scales on part of its shell resembling a broad toothy smile as its true jaws tensed. He saw the clawed hands twitch, and he could tell even without peering into its mind that it was excited. It would be a dangerous situation for a human to be near a Chryssalid at any time, but one worked up into a near mating frenzy… well, that was bad.

Without an ounce of caution or fear, Tofu reached out and touched it on the back of its hard-shelled skull. Instantly, it calmed, and returned to the shadows. Tofu could still see it there, despite the low light conditions and the creature's naturally near-dark coloring, as it returned to its little cranny between the plants. Once there, it curled up its front limbs, like a mantis, and went back to sleep.

Another howl of rage filled the humid air of the garden, this time accompanied by a voice.

"Release me! Pitiful creature!"

Another howl, this time fading into a whimper.

"Curse you! I will see you suffer for this affront!! Release me at once!"

Heedless, Tofu drifted towards the sound, his toes only touching the ground every couple feet. He didn't quite have true Ethereal levitation down yet, but he would in time. Winding between the gardens of towering, flowering, twisting alien plants he caught sight of more Chryssalids: first three, then seven, then thirteen of the creatures. They were huddled together to watch the spectacle, attracted by the psionic and olfactory emanations, chattering and snapping their claws. They were all part and parcel of The Mind, however, and The Mind would not give them permission to interfere. So they kept their distance, dipping their heads in unison and swaying forward and backward in shared fascination and excitement.

The objects of their interest lay in the center of a circular courtyard area within the garden. A wave of heat that would make a normal man wince in pain and discomfort washed over him like a light summer's breeze. Before him stood a most unusual sight: a creature out of legend and religious lore. It was a woman, stripped naked, with six arms and three heads. For him, the physiological and biological anatomy alone was quite fascinating, however this was no mere (rare as it was) case of conjoined triplets. No: this was an incarnation of the "demonic" being Asura, brought to life through the molecular control network that malfunctioned so badly under Jyusenkyou. Of course, it was not a real "demon" or "god," for those things did not exist, but it was close enough that certain religious denominations would consider the term acceptable.

Fortunately, Rouge's cursed form was also effectively constrained, albeit in an unorthodox manner. Thick black vines from the nearby plants immobilized her limbs and held her aloft, spread eagle and helpless. Even bound and sealed, the demon raged and cursed, lighting and fire threatening to erupt from its fingertips and mouth. However, out of the three heads, already two seemed to be unconscious. Only one remained: the one on the left. Its eyes were aglow, and he could see the seal branded onto its forehead glowing bright red.

Close by, Cologne sat in a meditative position, legs crossed and hands cupped.

The wide grin on her face said more than words ever could.

"Oh, Doctor…" she glanced in his direction, even as the bound Asura opened its glowing mouth to unleash another thunderous dinosaur-like howl. "I didn't see you come in. I'm a little busy right now, but do you need something?"

"There have been complaints about the noise," he coolly replied, unfazed by the ruckus of noise and twisting telekinetic energy.

Cologne's grin only widened. "Was that a joke? Oh, Doctor! You've been practicing!"

If he had still had his eyes, he would have rolled them. Besides, he had never been much of a jokester, as a human or as a Trenchard. Cologne just tended to bring out his mostly atrophied desire for human banter. Probably because she still clung to so much of her humanity, and her vanity. Really, did she **have** to strut about in the nude so much, looking as human as she did? None of the aliens cared, but he still felt it reflected badly on all of them as post-human Trenchards.

"You seem quite happy at the moment," he observed instead. "Are you having that much fun?"

She giggled in response, and went back to focusing her attentions on the nearly defeated "god" before her.

"I suppose I have been a little… giddy, lately," she replied, and focused for a moment. Asura's remaining head winced as if struck. "Everything is just going so well. Better than I imagined, even! I guess I've been on something of an emotional high."

He knew all about her plans, and what she expected. However, he was more conservative about their chances of pulling everything off in the end. Frankly, he'd be content with only a 50 success rate. Martial artists were simply too unpredictable in his experience for things to always go according to plan. It was true that Ryouga's last and most powerful Doppelganger had been destroyed, but they'd lost the mental connection to it at the very end. It was impossible to tell exactly what had happened, and whether it was really cause for celebration or not.

"Are you almost done here?" he asked, sparing the bound demon a casual glance.

"It won't be much longer," Cologne answered, licking her ruby red lips. "I've almost finished breaking it in. I'll admit though: this was a lot harder than the last spiritual entity I had to seal."

He frowned at that. "Do you **have** to call it a 'spiritual entity?'"

"Sorry. Force of habit."

"Release me…" Asura's remaining head whimpered, the demonic glow in its eyes fading. Its black hair was no longer whipped into a frenzy, instead it fell limply and loosely over its forehead, partly obscuring the glowing seal there. It repeated the demand a second and third time, before tears began to drip down its cheeks.

"Release me… please… don't… don't take away my… atma…"

"See?" Cologne remarked, chuckling in the afterglow of victory. "Ah, and the Ethereals are already on their way."

Tofu nodded. "That's one down."

"Tomorrow…" Cologne's light brown eyes sparkled with excitement and pleasure. "We'll see to our friend, Saffron. Two gods subdued in the same week… I think this'll be a new record for me!"

Tofu smiled despite himself, and watched as the last of Asura's resistance broke down. Cologne had been right. It hadn't taken very long at all. 


	77. Right Now II

Ranma resisted the urge to yawn.

Sitting next to him in the middle of the dojo, Genma shifted uncomfortably and glared at his tired son and heir. Ranma wanted to whack the lazy panda upside the head; while Genma lounged around on the base, Ranma had to be shuttled from place to place to fight evil freakin' aliens. He had just gotten back the night before, about as tired as he ever remembered being, and then as they were leaving the Skyranger Ukyou had said something about Ryu. Exactly what, he wasn't sure; he hadn't really been paying attention at the time, but the important thing was that it had jogged his memory and reminded him that he had a meeting with the Kumon heir the next morning.

'Fine,' he had thought. 'No problem. I'll still have a couple hours of sleep!'

Yeah. As always, things didn't turn out like he'd planned. Akane had been off duty the last few days, and for some reason his getting back from a mission made her frisky. By the gods, he could swear she was making up for lost time or something! Of course, they had to keep it hush-hush, which only seemed to add to a certain someone's excitement. Being a "man among men," as his mother liked to say, he had been more than committed to obliging his fiancée (besides, he was no dweeb). It was great and all - relationships, girls, happy happy – but man oh man, was he tired.

And sore. Stupid tomboy beating on him while she was asleep! This relationship was seriously going to kill him at this rate. How the Hell P-chan had survived all these years in Akane's bed, he had no fucking idea! At least when she was awake, she'd just pound you and then storm off. Sleeping next to her was like five times worse. Just: elbow, elbow, jab, stomp, kick, knee-to-the-groin. Next time she dropped in, he'd be sure to wear some pads or something.

"Love hurts" indeed.

"You don't look so good, boy," Genma leaned over to whisper. "Who gave you that black eye?"

"Akane," he replied, not even bothering to lie.

"Another fight, huh?"

"Somethin' like that."

"Well, try to suck it up. You're a martial artist! Start acting like it."

Ranma groaned and didn't dignify his old man with an answer.

The two Saotome men were alone in the dojo's main room with Ryu. The two soldiers had, for the moment at least, done away with their UNETCO uniforms and instead wore simple martial arts gis, much like Genma's. This was personal business within the Saotome School, so the doors were closed and the windows tinted. Even Soun, who technically ran the Dojo, wasn't – couldn't be - present. Not until the schools were formally joined, anyway.

"Kumon Ryu," Genma said, conducting the discussion in Japanese. "As reigning Grand Master of the Saotome Style Musabetsu Kakuto Ryu, I give you permission to speak."

Ryu sat before the two of them, legs tucked in and head bowed. It was no secret that he had a less than complimentary history with the Saotomes in general. Genma had given over the secrets of the _Yamasenken_, which had led directly to the destruction of the Kumon Dojo and the death of Ryu's father. Years later, after losing to Ranma's _Umisenken_, Ryu had been forced to seal his _Yamasenken_ techniques entirely. It wouldn't be accurate to say Ryu hated either of them, but he made no secret of the fact that he thought Ranma had treated him unfairly, and that Genma had been irresponsible in how he had passed on techniques without making note of their dangers. Nonetheless, he was a pragmatic young man, and holding a grudge would do little to see his goals achieved.

"Saotome-sensei," he said, speaking with sufficient respect that Ranma had to scoff. He hadn't called his stupid old man 'sensei' in a **long** time.

He continued, head still bowed, "Just as the Saotome style branched from the Ganso style of Happosai-sensei, I would respectfully ask that you acknowledge a distinct Kumon style of Yamasenken. A style that would not need to be sealed in times of peace, and one I could practice freely."

It was a serious request, and one both Saotomes had seen coming. They sat in silence for a few long seconds, thinking over what had been asked of them. The _Yamasenken_ was still a set of Saotome style techniques, and having lost his duel, Ryu no longer had the right to practice them as he saw fit. Right now, working for UNETCO, he was on borrowed time. Ryouga had wanted Ryu to be on his newly formed India Squad, and he had pulled more than a few favors to get Ranma and Genma to put a freeze on the _Yamasenken_ injunction (since the lost boy had saved their lives a few times).

Frankly, Ranma had been happy with how things were. The _Yamasenken_ were dangerous techniques… ones that didn't really fit his style of combat, and thus ones he had never cared to learn for himself. He had intended to take the techniques to the grave, along with the also too easily abused _Umisenken_, which he had also temporarily unsealed. It was unfortunate that this left Ryu in a bad situation, but that was how life was sometimes. It was for the greater good. Once the war was over, Ranma intended to not waste a moment in re-sealing both families of techniques.

"You know as we all do that the Yamasenken is too dangerous to be allowed to spread," Genma said, expressing both his opinion and that of his son. "After what happened to your father, and knowing the secret origin of these techniques, how can you still wish to practice them?"

Ryu looked up with a determined and unbowed expression on his face.

"Properly taught and applied, the essential premise of the Yamasenken can be reformed," he insisted. "I can reform it. The Musabetsu Kakuto Ryu was designed to take advantage of young women, and to steal, was it not? It was a lecher's survival art."

Ranma and Genma frowned in unison. But it _was_ true.

"Even now, the both of you are probably remembering the techniques you know that are designed to take advantage of women. To spy on them, to get cheap thrills from them, all under the guise of defending yourself in a fight," Ryu diplomatically cut short any further disparagement. "Yet, the Musabetsu Kakuto Ryu has overcome its origins. It has become an art, a powerful art… that one can practice with pride."

Ranma had to admit: Ryu could be pretty persuasive when he had to be. Thinking about what the young man had said, he _almost _believed it. It was all true, of course. To an extent, the _Musabetsu Kakuto Ryu_ had "overcome" and surpassed its origins as a lecher's art. However, no one could become a true master of it without knowing the founding path, and even walking it to some extent. Even he had done more than a few perverted things over the years, and of course, he had mastered all the master level techniques like the _Saotome Ryu Urawaza, Kyöi Shouaku Takazume Ken_ ( Saotome School rear skill, bust size commanding hawk talon).

Which only meant that the true secrets had to be kept in the family.

"I can do for the Yamasenken what you and Tendo-san did for the original art. Please give me the opportunity to prove myself!" Ryu finished, and bowed his head deeply.

Genma and Ranma exchanged looks. They had already talked about this possible situation. It would be easy to simply decline Ryu's request outright, and the ease of it alone made it tempting, but it was also a move Ryu would probably hold against them for the rest of his life. Likewise, those who had come to befriend Ryu would probably also not soon forget it. The Kumon heir was honorable enough that he would go his entire life with his dreams for a Kumon Senken dojo dashed, if it was necessary. Even Ranma couldn't admit that the idea of that sat well with him, and besides: the Saotome style had enough bad karma as it was.

Instead, they would give him a chance to honorably fail.

Not that they were cruel; that was just the tradition and way of the Art.

"Your request is not unreasonable," Genma admitted, speaking for the both of them as the head of the school. "We will give you a series of tests. If you pass all of them, then you will be allowed to found a branch school in the Kumon style."

Almost involuntarily, Ryu smirked, but quickly bowed his head again.

"Thank you, Saotome-sensei!"

"Just a second now!" Ranma interrupted, cracking his knuckles ominously. "Don't thank him yet. I've got an idea for one of those tests, ya know... How does 'overcoming the umisenken' sound?"

Palms flat on the floor curled into fists as Ryu looked up, still smirking.

"Truthfully?" he asked. "It sounds like something I'd enjoy very much."

* * *

"Pregnant? Wasn't she supposed to be sixty or something?"

"She's not that _that_ old."

"What'd she look to be? Thirty?"

Mousse shrugged, and dipped his hand back and forth. "Give or take. Early middle age, maybe."

Ukyou whistled. "Amazons must age well."

"Not the men. But Perfume was a bit special. Her body and ki affinity were pretty unique. Actually," Mousse inclined his head and leaned in a bit, speaking more conspiratorially. "She reminded me a bit of Ranma's mother. Nodoka, right?" She nodded, and he continued. "She has to be almost forty, right?"

"I know!" Ukyou spoke just a fraction louder than a whisper, sounding if anything more secretive and hush-hush about the topic than Mousse had been. "Have you ever seen Ranma, I mean girl form Ranma, stand next to her?"

Mousse's eyes were half-lidded in obvious sarcasm.

"Well, I was speaking facetiously of course," she replied, and Mousse purposefully pushed up his too-thick glasses. "But she almost looks like his older sister or something. Very weird."

He nodded.

"Even Ryouga's mom looks more her age, and she's a serious martial artist. Good genes, I guess…" Ukyou took a look behind Mousse, and waved. "Hey, it's Akane! Hey!"

Mousse pivoted, saw said Tendo sister, and inclined his head in passing greeting. She had entered the Psi Lab with her squad: a dark skinned Indian man, Khan, an older blonde woman, Lohse, and a tall dark haired Austrian, their CO Sergeant Winther. Neither Ukyou nor Mousse were all too familiar with Golf Squad. They were under Captain Banks' command, while India and Juliet mostly worked with or under Captain Ben-Solomon. Seeing them, Akane waved back.

There was no time to stand around and chat; not for her, anyway. Golf Squad walked through, paused at the register for only a few moments, and then headed off for their own training. Along the way, the blonde woman said something, and Akane replied, laughing. Ukyou quickly verbalized what they had both been thinking, seeing her.

"She seems to be doing well."

"Yeah," he agreed, and gave Ukyou a side-glance. "You surprised?"

"Are you?" she asked right back.

"A little I guess," he admitted. "I didn't think she'd get in, actually."

"Really?" Ukyou had a strange look – the kind that implied he had said more than he actually had.

"Hey, now! Don't jump to conclusions," he quickly added. "Akane's nothing if not determined, so it isn't like I think she's a quitter. Or that she's sub par or anything."

Ukyou was still Akane's sort-of friend, even if she also fancied herself her rival (when it came to Ranma), so she wasn't about to let possible disparagement slide. Not that she would raise a fuss about it – she didn't like Akane that much – but she wouldn't quickly forget it either. In a phrase, the relationship between the two girls towards each other could probably be summed up as "at least she's not Shampoo." Or something to that effect, as far as Mousse knew.

"So what was it, then?" she pointedly asked. "Didn't think she had the killer instinct?"

"Going by her battle aura, she certainly doesn't lack killer instinct," Mousse replied, and the two laughed a bit at the joke. Akane's temper was about as violent as they came, and she could put out a pretty fierce feeling battle aura when she was sufficiently pissed off (or jealous or both). Pity she didn't really know what to do with the aura once she'd drawn it out.

"I meant: I was sure Ranma would torpedo her admission."

Ukyou gave him a questioning look. "What? Why would he do that?"

"Isn't it obvious? He doesn't want her getting hurt." Mousse huffed, and adjusted his glasses again. "That's it."

Instead of asking something like 'why would he do that for her' Ukyou made a serious face and looked over to the Gym door.

"Could he actually do that?"

"Maybe," Mousse said, sensing her discomfort with the entire scenario. Ranma hadn't fought particularly hard to keep Ukyou and Shampoo from joining up. "He's an officer, so who knows what extra privileges he and the lost boy have."

She took the bait and quickly changed the subject. "How is that jackass?"

"Not too bad. I guess he takes impalement very well."

He smiled as Ukyou laughed again, her sour mood quickly disappearing. A little while later, Kuno entered, talking with Konatsu. They were just on time; he and Ukyou had both arrived a couple minutes ahead of time and started chatting to kill the time. The two of them quickly joined up, and the conversation switched to martial arts. Kuno and Konatsu had been having a rather involved discussion regarding sword styles, and _kenjutsu_ in general. Konatsu had more than a few ninja tricks, and he and Kuno had been exchanging ideas for techniques.

Naturally, it was a conversation he and Ukyou felt comfortable in. Ukyou used a unique sword style of her own, given the shape and nature of her mega-spatula, but she knew a good deal about the conventional styles as well. Mousse was perhaps the most well versed of them all, since his style incorporated an extremely wide variety of bladed weapons. Still, he was mostly familiar with Chinese derived weapons and weapons styles, while the other three focused more on Japanese arts.

Only a couple minutes later, Shampoo wandered in, heard the conversation, and felt the need to contribute. He was happy to see her so animated again, after the funk she had gone in and out of during their trip to the States. She was still a little unsure of his ideas for an Amazon Community, rather than a proper Amazon village, and she still expressed frequent disdain towards his insistence that it be multi-cultural and equal and open to both genders. The Elders had engrained a certain insularity and cultural arrogance into her that would be hard to overcome. In that respect, her years in Nerima had done little to improve her attitude towards outsiders. She was really the type who only respected warriors, which was why he thought coming to Seiran had done a lot to show her that there were great fighters from all around the world.

She was opening up, more and more every day, and it was wonderful to see.

Finally, Ryu and Ranma entered, the latter holding two blue folders under his arm. Unlike Kuno and Konatsu, they hadn't exactly been talking animatedly when they arrived. Instead, they seemed to be eyeing the other warily. They were all on duty, so the five Squaddies quickly straightened up and stood at attention. Technically, Ryu was a Squaddie, too, but with Ryouga still out relaxing in the medical ward he was the acting officer in India Squad. Oddly, Mousse didn't find that fact to be altogether as aggravating as he had first thought. He had never been particularly interested in being a commanding officer of any sort or stripe, and he had developed a healthy respect for Ryu as a soldier, as a martial artist, and as a person. Not that he wouldn't feel better once India Squad's real commander was back in charge…

Fighting with a guy turned into a piglet, with yourself as a duck, gave them a certain bond. That bond being "life doesn't get much stupider than this, does it?"

"Everyone's here, so I'll get right to it," Ranma announced, not standing much on formality. The five Squaddies relaxed slightly, but still stood quietly and listened.

"Ryouga and me have been plannin' on having our squads spend more time in the Psi Gym. I know, I know," he remarked, with more than a little exasperation. "We've been telling you guys to spend one to two hours a day in here already, but we're looking at a base assault as our next major combat action. There's no doubt now that there'll be Ethereals in there, so…"

"So we should prepare as best we can," Ryu spoke up, waiting a second or so to make sure Ranma wasn't continuing.

"Exactly," Ranma did continue, picking up where he left off. "So from now on, I'd like all of you to double the time you spend here. That's two to four hours over the course of a day. Now, no one's sayin' ya gotta become a master overnight or anything, but we could all benefit from some improvement. Yes, before you ask: even**me**."

Every single guy in the two squads resisted the urge to roll their eyes. Ranma cleared his throat, making it unclear whether the 'even me' comment was a bit of humor or not.

"Anyway, me and Ryouga came up with this idea to spice things up a little. Now, all your psi stats are personal medical info, technically, so only your officers and doctors have access to them. But if you're all ok with it, we could keep a running tally on everyone's stats and how much we improve. It wouldn't just be who has the highest scores, but who improves the most, and which team improves the most. Stuff like that. What'ya think?"

"I'd be up for it," Ryu spoke up first. Of course, he'd probably heard the whole plan beforehand, anyway.

"Me, too," Mousse quickly said, beating Kuno to the punch.

"Naturally," Kuno coolly announced, cupping his chin and smirking confidently. "I would be more than amenable to demonstrate my superlative mental facility."

"I guess I'm in," Ukyou agreed. "Could be fun."

"I will join in as well," Konatsu added.

Shampoo crossed her arms and glanced to the side at her peers. "It could be interesting."

"We're all in then!" Ranma took out a folded piece of paper, and quickly wrote their names down. Opening the first folder, he copied down numbers from each file. He then did the same for the other folder, representing information on the other squad.

There was a public cork billboard on the wall nearby, one third covered in notes and charts. Done writing down the eight stats, the pigtailed leader of Juliet Squad walked up to the board and pinned the paper to the wall. It was a ritual some of them, having gone to Furinkan High School, were familiar with. The school routinely made students' grades public, and not just to humiliate the underachievers and honor the hard workers – the five unfortunates with the worst grades in any subject always ended up shaved bald by the insane Principal.

The seven young men and women quickly crowded around to see their scores and how they stacked up to the competition…


	78. Right Now III

note: I can't seem to get the "psi chart" below to look very good here on FFN due to auto-formatting. Well, I'll try my best to work something out and compensate.

* * *

.,..,..,..,...Strength .,..,..,..Skill 

Ranma .,..,...76 /- 4 .,..,..51  
Ukyou .,..,...59 /- 2 .,..,..33  
Shampoo .,..60 /- 6 .,..,..34  
Konatsu .,..,.78 /- 2 .,..,..48  
.,..,..,..,..,..,..,..,..,..,..,..,..166

Ryouga .,..,...72 /- 6 .,..,..50  
Tatewaki .,..,.91 /- 9 .,..,..14  
Mousse .,..,...56 /- 2 .,..,..38  
Ryu .,..,..,...70 /- 3 .,..,..,..44  
.,..,..,..,..,..,..,..,..,..,..,..,..146

"Kuno has an average Psi Strength of ninety one?!" Ukyou stared at the boastful, delusional kendoist. "What the Hell?"

"Hahahaha!" Kuno boisterously laughed, thoroughly enjoying the looks of astonishment and envy. "At long last you realize the greatness and fastness that is the brilliant and incorruptible mind of Tatewaki Kuno, the Blue Thunder of X-Com! Whahaha!"

"You've also made the least progress in your psi training," Ryu pointed out, and Kuno deflated slightly. "I expect you'll make up for it in the coming days."

Slowly, Kuno nodded in acquiescence. "Yes. Perhaps a tad more serious training would be warranted…"

"Is… I mean: it is no surprise that I'm better than a certain someone," Shampoo observed, a little cattily. She and Ukyou exchanged glares, lightning crackling between the two rivals.

"We'll see about that, sugar! There's no way I'll just sit by and be weaker than you!"

"It'll be a dark day before I ever let you surpass me!"

Mousse let out a soft "hmmm" and turned to Ranma. "It seems you've been keeping just ahead of a certain someone."

Ranma crossed his arms and smirked. "As if I'd let the lost boy beat me at anything!"

'Typical Ranma…' Mousse thought dismissively before going back to the numbers on the board. He wasn't explicitly interested in outdoing or outshining any of his peers, especially since he'd realized it wasn't exactly helping him along with his goals. Oh, there was still a deep felt sense of competition with Ranma and Ryouga, both of whom he'd fought with and against many times, but it wasn't quite a "rivalry." He wasn't sure whether it was cultural or just personal, but he just couldn't work himself into any sort of righteous fury over how he wouldn't be outdone by this person or another. Who cared that much about winning, or the perception of winning; as long as he got what he wanted, what did the means matter?

Ranma (and even Ryouga) were the sort of thickheaded martial artist that simply had to counter every enemy's technique or "honorably" and "officially" beat an opponent at their own game. It was silly, really, especially when a poison needle, weighted chain, and a couple tons of concrete worked just as well. Then again, maybe it was just that sort of thinking that turned Shampoo off when he did win. Which was odd, because she was every bit as unapologetically ruthless as he could be. Either way, rivalry in general was something of a fool's game. Fighting the same person over and over again, over just about everything, was a pretty raw deal in his opinion.

Back to the board and the matter at hand: he had the lowest EBM count between them. He'd known his psi-strength hadn't been particularly high since he'd gotten tested, but he'd never really expected to be the last in the pack. At least his Skill level wasn't bad, but then he hadn't really been training as hard as he could have in his psionics. It was important, yes, but his real passion was unlocking the _Junyoken_. He was so close to getting the Peregrine Falcon Fist to work, too, but the two squad leaders were right: if they were going up against Ethereals, it was definitely prudent to spend more time on psionic defense, if not offense.

"You've got some pretty good numbers up there, Konatsu," he heard Ryu say, as the two digested the two squad's stats.

"Thank you, sir. I've tried to practice here regularly."

"No need for 'sir' with me. I'm just filling in."

"Your numbers make us a close match."

"Maybe we should be rivals, then! Then we can fight about everything and make boasts like 'I won't be beat by you' and 'I'll defeat him if it's the last thing I do!'"

Konatsu smiled shyly, and giggled girlishly. "Or 'I won't lose to you in anything!'"

"Exactly!"

Mousse watched the two out of the corner of his eye, somewhat amused by how they interacted. Ryu had originally seemed so put off by Konatsu's unorthodox mannerisms, back when they first met, that he hadn't wanted to talk to the male _kunoichi_ at all. Now they seemed quite familiar with each other, though there still seemed to be some lingering discomfort there. It probably wouldn't get much better when, or rather **if**, Ryu somehow managed to get that date with Ukyou that Mousse had heard about on the rumor vine.

"Ok, everyone! That's enough'a that!" Ranma spoke up, and the talking stopped as they gave him their undivided attention. "We've got work to do! Now come on. I've got some new toys for you guys to play with!"

The leader of Juliet Squad led them over to the Psi Lab register, and handed over a requisition paper. The register also served as a storeroom for Psi-related equipment, notably that used by the staff and the trainers. Waiting around for a few minutes, and passing the relevant security checks, Ranma eventually came back with two cardboard boxes repeatedly labeled FRAGILE and TOP SECRET.

"Our psi amps came in?!" Mouse blurted out, and quickly composed himself. "Already?"

"That was pretty quick," Ukyou chimed in. The data had only been sent to the Ocean City base in the United States a few weeks ago. OC handled virtually all the psi amp production required by UNETCO, and they were constantly making new amps for promising new recruits all around the world.

Ranma took the boxes over to a nearby table, and held out his hand. "Mousse, you wouldn't happen to have…"

The master of hidden weapons rummaged around in his sleeves for a second before cocking an eyebrow and whipping out a black plastic box cutter knife.

Ranma took the knife, inclined his head in thanks, but couldn't resist adding, "You're like the Home Depot on legs, you know that? You have any PVC in there?"

"That depends." Mousse replied seriously. "What gauge?"

The pigtailed one shook his head and started cutting open the first package. Ukyou, meanwhile, took the opportunity to ask a pressing question.

"Have you ever lost anything up there?" she carefully poked one of his drooping sleeves, just in case her doing so would somehow dislodge a cabinet full of fine china or something.

"I have wondered as much, myself," Kuno remarked.

"It is a fair question," Ryu agreed.

Mousse didn't answer right away. Instead, he held up one sleeve, his right one, so that everyone could see inside. It looked dark. And deep.

"Anyone care to reach in?" he queried, a hint of malicious humor in his voice. "Note that I can't be held responsible for what you find. Or what you lose…"

The five men and women shuffled nervously, looking from one to the other.

Finally:

"Stupid Mousse! Hiding things up your sleeves and pretending its some kind of magic! Don't make me laugh!"

Acting impulsively, as evidenced by her slight slip in proper language, Shampoo pushed Kuno to the side and dove her right hand into Mousse's sleeve. Her arm disappeared up to the elbow in the inky darkness, and her face abruptly changed from confident to confused. Moving her arm around, she tilted her head to the side in an effort to try and look inside.

"What is… what…?" She peered into the dark depths. "What is this? What on Earth…?"

"Here," Mousse lifted his other arm, letting the sleeve fall back to his elbow, and reached into the sleeve with Shampoo's arm in it. "Let me help. Were you looking for… this?"

Amazingly, pulling his hand back out, the five (six, actually, since Ranma was looking more at the scene in question than at the box he was supposed to be cutting open) saw nothing less than a white chicken sitting in the palm of his hand. For a few seconds, the assembled martial artists stared at the chicken, dumbstruck. Then Ukyou poked it, and it pecked at her finger and made a few clucking sounds.

"Keiranken," Mousse informed them of its name. It was basically the same technique he had used against Ranma two years ago. Pretty useless now, though.

"But that wasn't what you wanted, was it? Let's see…" Without warning, he slipped the chicken back into the darkness of his sleeve, and made a production about feeling around for something else. "No. No. That's not it. Is this it? Hmm. No, I don't know what that is. Where did I leave it…?"

"This isn't possible!" Shampoo reached deeper, and started feeling around at random. "Where did it go? This doesn't make any sense!"

"What's this?" Mousse pulled a couple wires out, including an s-video line and a headphone jack, and handed them to Ukyou. "Hold these, would you please? I think one of them is for my I-Pod."

Still flabbergasted, she dumbly took the wires, even as they trailed back into his sleeve and disappeared. Then Mousse went back in, and even playfully stuck his tongue out as he made a mockery of searching. Ukyou actually gave the wires a few experimental tugs, but didn't dare try and pull anything out. By this point, after trying to follow the wires to their source and failing, Shampoo had basically given up.

"Is this it?" Mouse's hand came back with… a bloody hand! "Oh GOD! Shampoo! What have I _done_!?!"

"Aieee!" Shampoo actually screamed and fell back, wrenching her hand out of the inky depths of Mousse's evil, evil sleeves. Quickly checking to make sure, she let out a sigh of relief that both her hands were whole and intact.

"Oh my!" Konatsu gaped, one hand primly and effeminately on his cheek. "Is that…?"

"A prop I used last Halloween?" Mousse asked, and tossed the realistic-looking hand in his direction. "Yep. I can't believe I left that in there. It was a big hit with the kids, you know, though not as neat as the skeleton…"

He chuckled at the memory, reached into his sleeve, and immediately pulled out a bouquet of bright red roses. He held them out to Shampoo, but then seemed to remember something; carefully, he picked out a couple long, sharp needles from between the flowers, holding them between his fingers. Snatching the delicate flowers by the stem, Shampoo jumped up and started wacking him on the head.

"Stupid Mousse! Never do that to me again!"

"Shampoo! Forgive me!!!"

"We are definitely the weirdest people on this base," Ryu noted, and the others couldn't help but nod in melancholy accord.

"Shampoo, Mousse," Ranma stood back up next to the table and two open boxes. "Rein it in, would ya?"

"Yes, sir…" Shampoo looked down at the now ruined roses in her hand, and quickly started to search for a trash bin. Not that it would help with all the rose petals and plant bits on the floor. Mousse, meanwhile, stood back up and tucked his hands and sleeves together. With a yip from Ukyou, he retracted the wires she had still been holding. They quickly disappeared back into the dark from whence they came.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Ranma said and gestured to the open boxes. "Your Psi Amps. You'll see your name on the plastic bag each one is in. Go ahead."

As Shampoo hurried back from throwing out the smashed bundle of flowers, the martial artists crowded around the boxes and searched for their names. Each of the psi amps had been packaged in a plastic wrap; half of them face up, half face down. Most of the labels were visible in either case, written in black marker on a large white sticker next to a bar code. One by one, they found theirs, and picked it out.

"Now," Ranma added, reaching down to pick out his own. He held it up for them to see: it resembled a forearm bracer and a glove very similar in design to the personal armor they had been wearing on missions. The difference was that the integrated amps in the glove made it much bulkier. Each one had a ruby colored crystal set into it, around the back of the hand, and some unusual streams of violet colored fluid that ran the length of the gauntlet beneath a surface of transparent alien alloy. The original Psi Amps had been large hand held units, but XCOM had eventually been able to tweak the design to be lighter and less obtrusive, so both hands could be kept on a weapon at all times.

"This is the Mark IV Integrated Artificial Psionic Amplification Unit. It is tailored to your specific EBMs and psionic signature, but in a pinch, you can use each other's. It just won't work as well. These are all yours, just like your personal armor, and you're responsible for keeping it in working order, and for adding it to your armor. Arugula or anyone at the Quartermaster's office can help you with that if you're having trouble."

Ranma ripped open the packaging seal, and pulled the amp out of the plastic.

"We've mostly been practicing here with Mark IIIs and stationary units," he explained. "But the Mark IVs are supposed to be a little different. So before we do any real practice with these babies, we're going to learn from someone who knows all the tricks. I'll be right back, so each of you try your amp on and see how it feels."

He then headed off towards the practice rooms, coming back a minute later with a tall man, slightly dark skinned, with a bald head and a generous moustache. He was already wearing a Mark IV psi amp on his right arm, and the rank stitched onto his shoulder made clear that their teacher for the day would be none other than Seiran Mountain's Captain Banks. The letters PSI rested under his rank insignia, and a small silver pin on his collar further reinforced his prominent position among UNETCO's certified psionic community. Throughout XCOM, the rank of Captain tended to belong to those with the most formidable psionic and leadership skills, and the two men with that rank on base were powerful individuals.

'We'll begin by learning some introductory telepathic communication,' Banks spoke clearly in their heads. 'Then we'll move onto the mid level stuff.'

* * *

"Well! You don't look particularly hurt!" 

Ryouga lowered the clipboard he had been using, raising an eyebrow and giving his latest visitor an incredulous look. It was late, and Nabiki was plainly off duty given her lack of a proper uniform. She'd exchanged it for a casual white shirt and black pants. He watched her carefully, and despite himself, he remembered what Kasumi had said before.

It was true that they had developed a sort of tit-for-tat relationship, and he had even come to feel rather relaxed and unguarded around her. It was also true that he was generally trusting when it came to women, so his judgment probably wasn't the best in the world. And he certainly hadn't been close to many women before; in fact, they tended to make him very nervous, Akane especially. The exceptions seemed to be Ukyou, Akari, Kasumi and Nabiki. Aside from Akari and Kasumi being very kind to him, there wasn't much similarity between the four. He mostly treated Ukyou like one of the boys, but Nabiki… he wasn't sure what he thought of her, really.

She had a terrible reputation for general mischief and evil, though admittedly most of his prior experience came from her swindling him, Ranma ranting about being at the receiving end of her schemes, and Akane occasionally worrying that she was "up to something." To her credit, though, she'd never treated him all _that_ unfairly. She hadn't blackmailed him, which was apparently one of her favorite tricks, so he had to wonder: was there an angle? Why would she be treating him better than he'd heard she treated Ranma and so many others?

Perhaps it was just gratitude?

_"I can't believe she put me through all that," Ranma had grumbled, as they sat on the roof, nursing the wounds from their latest duel. Sometimes they just parted ways, sometimes they hung out around the dojo, and sometimes Ranma liked to meet on the roof and chat. Ryouga never found he had much to say, no matter which one they did after fighting. Usually he was just glad he hadn't gotten lost._

_"I saved her life, ya know? Or at least I kept her from getting hurt. And this is what I get…" Ranma frowned, his normally cheerful expression betraying vexation and confusion. From his story, Nabiki really had worked him over with the whole 'replacement fiancée' thing. From what Ranma had said…_

Nabiki didn't **do** gratitude.

"If you ask me, I think you're just faking it to get some time off!" She pulled up a chair and sat down next to his bed, and seemed to notice he was staring.

"What?" she asked, and gave him an alluring smile. "See something you like, Ryouga-kun?"

"Huh!" he scoffed, and looked away. It was hard to reconcile so much of what he had heard about her with the her he knew from personal experience. Had she changed, or was her attitude towards him just different? When he wasn't around, did she revert to the her he had heard about, trying to bankrupt people, cheat people, manipulate people; hurt people? No: no, she had behaved herself pretty well since coming to Seiran, as far as he knew. Really, he wasn't even sure why he cared. What Nabiki did around other people wasn't his business, and had little bearing on their business, but he was… curious, he supposed.

"So," she said, leaning in a little closer. "Can I see it?"

"It?" he asked, not knowing what she was talking about. By the look on her face, he could guess she was playing around with him. Again.

"The scar I've heard about," she clarified.

"Why would you want to see that?" He wasn't super keen on putting himself on display to begin with.

"I've seen you kicked through walls and beaten over the head with a giant tanuki statue." He remembered that fight! And that tanuki had been a precious gift, too! She continued, "I've even seen you catch a sword in your hand. So I just want to see if you can get hurt in the first place."

"Of course I can get hurt…" he mused, but relented. There was little point in not just giving Nabiki what she wanted. Sitting up, he felt some of his wounds protest, but he didn't mind the pain much. The more it hurt, the quicker he could set his _ki _to healing the part causing the problem. He was topless anyway, so he just let the sheets fall off to his side as he pointed to the scar on his abdomen, between the muscle. The Doppelganger, even missing his heart, had managed to pierce a weak spot that would have otherwise mitigated the injury.

"That's a big one," she said, and seemed to enjoy herself prodding the healing tissue. He'd had the stitches removed, and it was looking better than before, but it would still never heal over totally smoothly.

"Hurt much?' she asked.

He shook his head at the question. "I was five seconds from having my intestines pulled out… Yeah, it still hurts a little."

Her prodding stopped for a moment, and instead she put her hand on the wound, gently. He'd expected another joke or something in reply, but instead she became… almost contemplative. Resting his clipboard on his lap, he let out a deep breath and shook his head. The wound had been a nasty one, and if he ended up at the River Sanzo one more time, it would be three too many. Near death experiences often made a martial artist stronger, but each one had been worse than the one before. If it happened again…

"That thing almost killed you," she said, finally, sounding almost contrite.

"I guess I should thank you… for helping me before." He then added, "And for not relaying the fire order."

"You're damn right you owe me for that!" Her mood changed, becoming light again as she looked up at him. "Don't think I'll forget, either!"

His mood, however, remained pensive. "Things worked out this time… but next time, Nabiki, next time I make a decision in the field I expect you to follow it. Even if it kills me. You _should_ have relayed the fire order."

For a moment, she looked at him, shocked. Then she frowned, her lips turning down in a small scowl.

"If I had passed on that order, you'd be in about a million pieces right now."

"And if I hadn't pulled a win out of my ass back there, then I'd still be dead, and so would a lot of others!"

She glared at him, seemed to start on a retort, and then bit it back.

"Nabiki," he said, softening his tone. He really didn't like talking to women harshly (well, except maybe Ukyou). "You thought up a way to get me where I had to be. I'd put my life in your hands again in any mission. Your quick thinking really saved us… and I appreciate that, I really do! But in the field, I made life or death decisions. That's my job. If you can't pass on an order like that, then I can't work with you."

The two sat in silence together for a while after he said that.

Then she hit him on his shoulder.

"Jerk."

"Sorry."


	79. Guns and Roses I

**Author's Note**: _For organizational purposes, this chapter (although of normal length) will be considered two "parts" instead of three. The next chapter, similarly, will be made up of four "parts" instead of the usual three. This is the last of the "talkie" chapters before The Big Show of Chapter 28._

-----

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. Despite a surge of activity in the Far East theatre, and fierce battles waged to unseat the Sirius Conspiracy and avenge the loss of the Joketsuzoku village, UNETCO and the two new squads have prevailed time and time again. With the threat of Cologne and other second generation Trenchards (alien human hybrids) looming ahead, the high command readies for a strike at one of the planet's last remaining alien bases. For India and Juliet squads, confrontation with these corrupted master martial artists is inevitable. 

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia**  
Chapter XXVII  
_Guns and Roses_

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

SeiranMountain enjoyed a rare degree of isolation in an otherwise rather crowded island nation. Nestled within state owned parkland, its altitude, ruggedness, and lack of a picture-esque peak made the location rather unattractive even for the wilderness hikers who could technically attempt to climb it. No large or significant wildlife made the mountain its home; for the most part it was an unremarkable tree-covered hump in the middle of nowhere. Only its use, fifty years prior, as a hollowed out shelter hangar for Japanese kamikaze planes gave it any distinction whatsoever.

It was the middle of December and a peaceful blanket of morning snow had fallen around the mountain peak and the surrounding woodlands. Only a few trace clouds drifted meekly across the blue sky, remnants of the snowstorm that had swept through the day before. On the ground, a rustle of pine leaves and snow heralded the fall of a tree, disturbing the serenity of the winter scene. Unfortunately for the forest, the tree was only the last of several to suffer in the face of the morning's activities.

"You sure we have to take it down?"

"It's an accident waiting to happen right now."

The tree in question stood, but barely. The ground nearby was pockmarked by scars: sandy craters blasted into the frosted over soil, outcroppings or rock and giant stones dashed or cut cleanly into pieces, and other toppled trees. This last old tree likewise had its wounds from the battles it had witnessed. In its once sturdy trunk one could see sap leaking from what appeared to be finger marks and a semi-circular hole torn into its side. Standing next to the tree, Ryu patted it a few times while looking up at the branches overhead. 

"It isn't that bad," he said, craning his neck. "Still pretty sturdy."

A bandaged hand ran over the jagged hole in its side. 

"It'll be rotted through by spring." Ryouga stooped down to get a close look at the damage. "There's no way this hole will grow over."

"It should be fine!" Ryu assured him, leaning against the tree to show its sturdiness. "Besides, what's the chance it'll fall right when someone walks by?"

"Someone besides you walks by," he quickly annotated.

"All right. All right!" Ryouga relented, and stood straight again. Like Ryu, he was wearing scout-class personal armor. Both had their helmets off as well. Reaching up to his nose, the lost one held his nose and sucked in a sharp breath of cold air with a loud 'snooork' sound. A second later, he spat a bloody wad onto the ground and rubbed his nose. 

"Haven't had a bloody nose in a while…" he remarked, but there was no trace of resentment of annoyance.

"You took a Moko Kaimon Ha to the face," Ryu observed, leaving the tree to walk alongside his commanding officer. Here, outside the base and between themselves, they switched back to conversational Japanese rather than English. "I kick down trees and concrete walls with that move, and you're surprised you have a bloody nose?"

"I'd have blocked a normal Moko Kaimon Ha," Ryouga countered. "You never used to be this tricky."

"The old Yamasenken was too inflexible," the Kumon heir replied, and the two headed off to where the rest of India Squad were finishing up their morning training. Ryouga, of course, followed Ryu to keep from getting lost. The arrangement was second nature by this point. 

"Getting ready for that fight with Ranma, eh?"

"It isn't just the fight with Ranma. The Yamasenken was designed to break into people's homes. That's why it's so inflexible. The Moko Kaimon Ha is supposed to kick in a door. Part of reforming the school is to break out of the original mindset. Making the moves more adaptable to other situations and opponents… that's just a side benefit."

Ryouga nodded, able to see exactly what Ryu meant.

"You think Ranma will use other moves in our fight?" he then asked. "Besides the Umisenken, I mean?"

Ryouga crossed his arms, but replied quickly, "I doubt it. Ranma hates to lose, so I'd expect every dirty trick in the book, but he has his pride, too."

"A proud man wouldn't use dirty tricks in the first place…"

"There's a difference, at least in terms of Musabetsu Kakuto Ryu, between tricking your enemy into making a mistake and breaking your word. If Ranma beat you with… a Hiryu Shoten Ha for example, all it would prove is that he can't beat you in an honest duel between Yamasenken and Umisenken. But tricking you, outsmarting you, that's fair game."

"You sound like you almost agree with him."

"I've… started to see his point of view," Ryouga conceded. "But that doesn't mean I agree with him. Besides, I'm not really clever enough to trick people in the first place."

Ryu refrained from asking, 'but you would if you could?'

Well, he did for a few seconds anyway.

"But you would if you could?"

"Ha!" Ryouga barked out a rare laugh. Looking to his side, Ryu could see the lost lieutenant was smiling.

"Maybe," he admitted. "I've thought about it in a few fights."

"Same here," Ryu likewise confessed. "Its harder to pull off than it sounds."

The two shared a few moments of light hearted laughter as they headed through the snow covered forest back to the main camp. By the smell of it, Kuno and Mousse were already finished clearing and cleaning up their side of the battleground and had settled down to an early lunch. Ryouga took the opportunity to clear out his nose again, pinching it experimentally a few times.

"Good job, by the way," he said, satisfied it was done bleeding and stuffing up.

"With what?"

"Operation White Scar. The Hill type mission."

"That! Hardly even a fight…" Ryu chuckled weakly, not used to praise of the sort he was getting. "And we were just backup for Delta Squad anyway."

"No. You made the right call, and I'm glad the Commander gave you a mission to prove yourself on," Ryouga replied honestly.

Ryu beamed, though with him it wasn't easy to tell. "Thanks, sir."

"Your report _was _a little sloppy, though."

Ryu took a moment to reflect on the mission: he and India Squad had been activated to support Delta Squad on a relatively routine mission. Ryouga had called it a "Hill type" mission, after Betty and Barney Hill, the most famous early abductees. It was also called an "Indian Head" for the location one mile north of where they were allegedly picked up. It usually involved one or more repeat abductees, usually a male/female pair, picked up in an isolated abduction. It could occur on a ship or plane, but most often the abductees were in a car.

UNETCO regional policy (in most of the developed world) was to identify and track as many repeat abductees as possible. Like a criminal returning to the scene of a crime, the aliens would inevitably come back to check up on their little experiments and test cases. XCOM liked to be there when they did, lying in wait, usually with some heavy firepower. This time, their target had been a deep space large scout and not a local craft, so they had scrambled and gotten to the abductees' car just moments after the aliens landed.

Delta Squad, now under the command of Sergeant Kinoshida, had been hog tied with two rookies with only basic anti-alien training under their belts. India (minus their normal commanding officer) and newly-promoted-Lieutenant Feretti's Charlie Squad had been assigned as backup and overall command. The large scout had a minimal crew, but the Sectoid bastards had laid an ambush using one of the abductees. One of the rookies had gotten sloppy, overeager, and he'd ended up killed. The aliens had counterattacked, leaving their ship almost empty. Guessing that Delta had bitten off more than it could chew, Ryu called in for permission to pull his team off the ship assault. They'd made a quick run to flank the aliens and support Delta while Charlie assaulted a nearby house the enemy had occupied.

His orders had called for India to handle the nastiest close quarters fighting, but he'd gauged the situation and took a chance based on the situation. Luckily Feretti had approved the plan, and it had worked out in the end; while he hadn't thought much about it at the time, after the fact Ryu had nearly sweated bullets about making the decision as he did. If he'd been wrong, then they'd have turned their backs to the aliens in the UFO, and left Charlie in a bad spot of trouble. Really, it had been a relief to Ryu to have India Squad's real CO back in action. 

"Hey," Ryu began to ask, more tentatively than before. "I'd like to ask you something else… about Ukyou…"

"This again?" Ryouga grumbled. They both knew that it wasn't as if Ryouga disliked Ukyou, or talking about her, but relationship related things in general were complicated and messy, so he tried to avoid them as much as possible. Plus: "Why do you always ask me about her?"

"Mousse said you two went out a few times, and Akane said you guys were an item at one point…"

"We did **not** go out. Once. Twice. Or **any** times," Ryouga answered, trying (against all odds) to set the record straight. "Those were all stupid misunderstandings or plans to break up Ranma and Akane."

"So you didn't escort her through some Tunnel of Love thing in Tochigi?"

"Nothing even remotely like it sounds."

"And you two didn't go on an all expenses paid hot springs vacation together?"

Ryouga groaned, head slumping in defeat. "I was **trying** to get to Jyusenkyou!"

Ryu sounded skeptical. "So you two spent a week together going to beaches and hot springs… and you weren't a couple?"

"We weren't even friends."

"Did she ever put on a bathing suit and ask you what you thought about it?"

Ryouga's frown only partly hid an embarrassed blush. "She asked me if 'Ranma would like it' and if 'it would attract customers'… neither of which were exactly turn-ons."

"I don't know," Ryu said with a half grin. "That whole situation sounds like an excuse for fooling around to me. You two didn't do _anything_?"

"We made a lot of money selling okonomiyaki to tourists," Ryouga dryly replied. "Oh, and _she_ spent a lot of time buying things and making _me_ carry them. Overall, the whole thing was one huge headache. All I wanted was to get to Jyusenkyou, damnit!"

Ryu gave the other martial artist a long took. "That must've been a… hard week."

The other man just growled.

"Still, you can see why I'd ask you about her, right?"

"Yeah, yeah…"

"So I asked Ukyou's father to switch the engagement…"

"You actually went through with that!" Ryouga stared at him like he was out of his bloody mind. "Haven't you learned anything from the mess that caused in Nerima?"

"Don't worry," Ryu assured him. "We kept it quiet. I was just, you know, testing the waters and stuff. Kuonji-san seemed receptive to the idea, especially after that fight he had with Saotome-san…"

Ryouga nodded; he'd heard about that. Apparently Genma and Kazuo had actually come to blows during an argument about Ukyou's stolen dowry. The problem wasn't that they had a fight, but that it had happened outside the dojo. Luckily, no one had been hurt and nothing substantial damaged, but Commander Yasuda had blown a gasket and threatened to lock them both up in alien containment. Which he could understand… even though he already had a parent confinement and didn't find the implication as funny as some. 

"…I asked her if she'd like to go with me to movie night."

"_Tonight's_ movie night?"

"It wasn't 'tonight' when I asked her. This was just after we got back," Ryu explained, getting to the troublesome part. "So she said 'ok' and I said, 'it's a date.' And then she just kind of dropped the whole thing."

Ryouga held his head in his hand, shaking it morosely. "Here we go…"

"You think I shouldn't have said that?" Ryu asked, honestly. "Thinking about it now, I think I should have said 'see you then' or something. I emailed her later, to make sure we're still meeting up before then, but she hasn't responded. And it's been a few days."

Ryouga was still shaking his head.

"Man," Ryu grumbled in unhidden aggravation. "This is why arranged marriages are so much easier!"

"You'd think," Ryouga quipped. "Just go and wait and see. You shouldn't be thinking about this more than she is."

Ryu thought about that and smiled. "Yeah. Probably not."

"Either way, keep this personal stuff to your off hours," India squad's lieutenant hastily added. "I don't want to see you glancing at her or anything like that when we have our Pathfinder briefing later today."

"Yes, sir!" Ryu replied curtly. He knew the regs, just like they all did. The information had been imprinted into their minds, after all. As a military organization, XCOM was rather unique; given the stressful nature of alien combat and the mixed gender armed forces it was seen as basically inevitable that troops would mix and match a little bit. Taking the pragmatic view in those early years (coupled with atrociously high loss rates) Command only set down a few major ground rules.

The code of conduct didn't try and cut all attempts at fraternization. Most of the regs only applied to soldiers of non-squaddie rank within the same immediate combat arm. Teammates and officers were taboo, but any grunt of any rank could hook up with a pilot or mechanic or scientist or tech. Within the UNETCO community, a few of the 'office affairs' were even pretty infamous, like the still ongoing one between Andermatt's (now married) Commander Bennett and Colonel Laurentz. 

However, as comparatively free a hand as XCOM squaddies had, 'sleeping in the ranks' was still pretty taboo among the mostly military base population. As such, when it did happen, it had to be firmly and strictly restricted to off hours. XCOM bases were small communities of typically only a couple hundred people at the most. Like in a small town, word traveled fast, and even battle hardened veterans tended to talk (or 'gossip' depending on whether you wanted to lose a few teeth or not).

As expected, they soon saw Mousse and Kuno sitting in one of the large craters created during the morning's fighting, already starting on their midday meal. Ryouga's and Ryu's gear was also nearby, resting at the edge of the crater. It was dry within the perimeter of the blast. While most of the ground still had a couple inches of snow to it, in the crater the ground was more like fine gravel. As such, it made a handy and convenient place to sit and eat. There was something different this time, though. Four small saucer like _sakazuki_ cups were arranged on the ground. Sitting in front of two of them, Mousse and Kuno were grinning and waiting, but not drinking. 

"What's all this?" Ryouga asked, sitting down for himself next to his gear and in front of one of the little ceramic cups.

"About time," Ryu commented, sitting down cross legged. "I had to walk around in a circle to buy time for you guys."

And, of course, the directionally impaired lost boy hadn't noticed. 

"Just a little congratulatory drink," Mousse answered. He added with a smile, "Lieutenant."

Ryouga looked from him to Kuno.

"Which one of you two clowns smuggled alcohol off base?" he asked, sounding neither angry nor amused. "And which one suggested we drink it on duty?"

Kuno started to open his mouth, no doubt to loudly and proudly proclaim his guilt in the matter. Ryouga quickly cut him off with a wave of his hand. The base stocked drinks for off duty; anyone of any rank could drink, docking the price from their personal account. To go through this much trouble for India Squad to share the drink just between themselves… it had to be some of the _good_ stuff. 

"One day into getting my official commission to real Lieutenant, and you guys pull this…" He sighed and picked up the ceramic cup. "Let's just drink this before I realize what I'm doing."

Kuno happily picked up his cup, and toasted. "Lieutenant!"

"Congratulations," Ryu said, picking up his own cup.

"Yep," Mousse said and then toasted to someone else. "And to our new Sergeant! Congratulations, Ryu!"

The four raised the saucers and quickly downed the drinks. As the four started eating packed lunches and chatting like old friends, Ryouga paused to watch them. He'd been sort of unsure at first, when he'd originally formed India Squad, but now there was no group of soldiers he'd rather fight alongside. Tomorrow. Tomorrow was the big day: the assault on the alien base in Korea. Command had generously estimated 10 to 20 losses. Out of the eight men and women in India and Juliet squad, that meant there was a good chance that one of them would die. 

The command staff, in fact, everyone in XCOM never really talked much about the bad times. The first six months of operation, UNETCO's combat divisions had suffered more than 50 casualty rates. For most operations, now, that was down to 5 or 10. Alien bases were another matter, though. No one would fault India Squad a single on duty drink, the day before they stormed that alien citadel. Inside, Ryouga felt torn: part of him wanted to protect his friends, but part of him knew he had to trust in their abilities and keep faith with the fact that they had a bloody and dangerous job to do. All he could do was fight and lead them as best he was able.

Lieutenant.

There was more than just the battlefield commission, too; he'd also received an honorary Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Psionics. Which meant Combat Psionics, specifically. Straight out of the hospital bed, he and Ranma had stood before Commander Yasuda and received their new rank and privileges. No longer 'special interim lieutenants' of experimental squads, they were now the real deal, with all the authority of the older and more experienced officers of their grade. That included the responsibility to assign a Squad Sergeant. Ryouga had chosen Ryu, given his high level of general competence, dedication, and developing leadership abilities. Ranma had (perhaps predictably) chosen Konatsu for many of the same reasons, though the lost one still thought the genius ninja a bit too timid when it came to giving orders.

In reality, though, very little changed. 

They made the same amount of money, filled out the same paperwork, had the same responsibilities… true, there was a bit more leeway when it came to appropriating equipment, and their authority in a broad sense was more clear cut, but it was all basically ceremonial. He'd originally thought of the degree in much the same way. What good was a piece of paper to someone with his lifestyle, wandering from place to place? Education was important, but he'd tried attending school; it just didn't work. For a long time, he'd absolved himself of any notion of higher education. Now… maybe it would be worthwhile telling his mother. He couldn't remember the last time he'd come to one of his parents looking for apropos, but it seemed like something a mother would be happy to hear.

And all he had to do was categorize and record the "telekinetic" techniques of himself and others and give copies of the documents to UNETCO. It wasn't a bad deal at all, really. They funded everything, opened up correspondences with intelligent people who had looked at the field from a different and strictly scientific point of view, and set him loose. He wasn't sure what Ranma was doing, but it was probably much the same, minus the research into 'special tactics' like his new killing point… 

'I never would have guessed that me and Ranma would be the first to get undergraduate degrees. We're not exactly university material… Hell, none of us are, except maybe Akane and Ukyou…' 

"Hey, what's that?"

Ryouga perked up, putting aside his thoughts and taking a bite out of his lukewarm caesar salad chicken wrap. Kuno and Mousse were already done, and now nursing their bottled water. The former had also taken out a letter, and kept it in his lap while he read. The former seemed to be leaning over to catch a look, and conspicuously adjusting his thick glasses as he did so.

"Knave! Intrude not on the personal space of Tatewaki Kuno!"

"Since when do you get letters?" Mousse asked, leaning in closer to read despite Kuno elbowing him none-too gently. "And why bring it here if you don't plan to share what's in it?"

Ryu chuckled at the scene, and Kuno sighed with (false) indignation.

"Tis a letter from mine twisted sister," he admitted with another over dramatic sigh. 

"Ah!" Ryu chuckled again. "Kodachi, is it? How's she doing?"

"By both the tone and inflection of the letter, she seems quite perturbed," Kuno replied, with some amount of satisfaction directed towards his sister's discomfort. "She is safe; this much is true, but in the manner of a caged warbler."

"Translation?" Ryouga asked, plainly.

"She longs for family to experiment on and a paramour to torture with her affection," Kuno translated. Sort of.

"She misses Ranma," Mousse noted, reading through Kuno's poetic speech mannerisms. "Well, there's no accounting for taste, I guess. She always did seem rather attached to him."

"Why was that?" Ryu asked. "She was the fiancée Ranma wasn't **really** engaged to, right?"

"Yeah," Ryouga replied. "Now, I was P-chan at the time, but I remember talking about it later. Kodachi was out to cripple some competition when Ranma knocked her off a building. He saved her, too, and you can imagine what happened after that."

"She poisoned him and tried to have her way with him?" Mousse guessed. 

"Something like that."

"Alas, my poor sister was most disconsolate going to an all girls' school. She never did take our father's misadventures in Hawaii well…" 

For a moment, Kuno appeared genuinely contrite for her sister's abandonment issues. Then his mood lightened, and he pointed to the letter in his lap.

"However, it does seem as though she has made some new friends! She speaks most viciously about these other two gymnasts with whom she has developed a heated rivalry. There also seems to be some boy that has caught her eye."

"Anyone we know?" Mousse asked. "All the martial artists we found were sent to the same Sanctuary Community."

"These girls go by the names of Natsume and Kurumi," Kuno read from the letter. "They appear to be sisters. She adds here that I would 'drink deeply of the former's appearance, as she is most comely, of regal bearing, and buxom to the point of dressing in the manner of a harlot.'"

For a few seconds, the three martial artists mentally translated Kuno's words.

"Where the hell did you guys learn to write, anyway?"

"As is the natural order when the father is in-attendant, Kodachi would often come to me for assistance in her schoolwork, better to emulate my refined diction and grammar…"

"You had to ask, didn't you?" Ryouga rested his chin on his hand. "Natsume and Kurumi, huh? I can see those two giving Kodachi trouble."

"Did we bring them in?" Mousse asked, searching his memory. "I don't recall two girls…"

"Ranma's bunch probably found them," Ryouga answered. "They were food thieves from a while back. The younger one, Kurumi, had one hell of a mouth on her."

The three boys stared at him.

"Not what I meant," the lost one clarified. "She ate some pineapples I was bringing to Akane as a gift from the islands. At least I think I was in Hawaii when I got them… Either that or Hokkaido… Anyway, she ate them with a speed that was inhuman… "

"OH!" Mousse snapped his fingers. "Those two! They stole Shampoo's ramen!"

"Yes, and my unagi bento!" Kuno roared, suddenly remembering. "Those foul bandits were comely girls! Curse the fates for not leaving me with their number!"

"Wait!" Ryu interrupted. "How the Hell do two girls – no offense to our female friends – manage to steal from you guys?"

Kuno and Mousse immediately sulked, little black clouds hanging over their heads. For once, Ryouga remained impassive. He held up his hand finished sandwich wrap.

"Three things," he said, shaking his head at the other defeated Nerimites present. "They were fast, maybe about Mousse's speed, and they struck with the element of surprise. Worse, the food was gone, as in eaten, by the time anyone could realize it had been stolen. While the Chardin style of martial arts cuisine that Ranma knows is technically faster, for pure eating speed with no gimmicks, I'd say that Kurumi's ability is the more terrifying. Kasumi told me that even several courses of Akane's cooking – bless her for trying – didn't daunt that girl."

"Even Akane's food?" Ryu whistled appreciatively. "That's quite a feat, all right."

"They use a ribbon in their fighting, too," Ryouga added. "So I'm not surprised they can face Kodachi in the gymnastic ring. The techniques are similar."

"If they're strong, why didn't you recruit them?"

"Kurumi was too young, and they're inseparable." The lost one shrugged. "Otherwise I'd have considered it. In the one fight I saw from them, though, they lacked a killer instinct… I don't think they'd fare well in this kind of fighting, even if Kurumi was older."

He remembered that fight well. The girls had given a good showing, and they were suitably determined, but they were soft, too. He'd trained Akane practically up to Kurumi's level (minus the special techniques) in less than a week, despite having to go easy on her and secretly starting to hope she didn't win at all (since it would mean she would be around him more). What Kurumi critically lacked was aggression. Even the most stoic martial artist understood what it meant to harness that primal emotion. Natsume had potential, but her little sister would never be able to work up what it took to take another's life. He was sure of it.

Then again, if the war dragged on long enough, maybe the two sisters would join up and prove him wrong…

"Check this out!" Mousse interrupted, standing up and holding Kuno's letter. "Guess who Kodachi compared to Ranma in this!"

The two took a moment to stare at him.

Mouse chortled in genuine amusement. "Here's a hint: they're both arrogant assholes!"

"Pantyhose Taro!"

"Got it!"

"He's the only guy I know who we'd call a bigger arrogant asshole than Ranma!"

"You'll pardon my ignorance, but who is this Pantyhose Taro?" Kuno interrupted, a glint of brotherly protectionism in his eye. 

"I wondered what happened to him," Ryouga said as he sat back down. "They said the Chengdu branch got him, so they took him off the list, but then nothing."

"Another martial artist?" Ryu asked, though it was obviously true. He wouldn't have been on The List otherwise.

"Pantyhose **is** pretty good," Mousse grudgingly admitted, as he too sat down. "He's Chinese so you wouldn't know him. He uses conventional Kung Fu, mostly."

"That… and his cursed form," Ryouga continued. "He turns into this huge flying monster. Still fast, but a whole lot tougher and stronger. Tougher and stronger than me, even."

Ryu could tell it was hard won praise from two stubborn martial artists that still held grudges. "So why is he sitting back in an SC?"

"He probably wouldn't lose the curse," Mousse answered, when Ryouga took a few moments to think over the question. "He likes turning into a monster when he gets wet."

"Ranma's curse keeps him human," Ryouga said, nodding. "That's why Command lets him keep it. They wouldn't let Taro fight **and** keep his curse. Plus, he doesn't seem like the type to risk his life for money **or** a cause."

"This does not bode well…" Kuno mulled over the note. "Then again, mayhap I was mistaken. Though heaven decrees a woman but one love, my sister is no normal maiden. If any woman has heart enough for two men, it would be another of the Kuno line! Very well! I will not oppose this tryst, so long as she resumes her affair with Saotome and keeps him away from my pigtailed girl and Akane Tendo!"

"Gotta keep things in perspective, after all," Mousse joked giving the boastful kendoist an incredulous look. "You do know she only called him cute in that letter. Though the tentacles remark was a little disturbing…"

That shut the four of them up.

"Damnit," Ryouga mumbled, wiping a bit of blood from his nose. Not that he was thinking anything perverted, _of course_. He was still an injured man.

"That's pretty kinky," Ryu observed shamelessly; causing the other three men present to shift in discomfort.

"She does seem like the type… to you know…" Mousse added in, snickering. "Bondage and whips and stuff."

SNIK

"Not to imply she's anything but a chaste maiden," the Chinese martial artist amended, using a finger to inch away the sword held up to his neck.

"Wearing a leotard under your clothes at the airport is sort of…" Ryu made a back and forth motion with his hand. "You know. Still, with a body like that why wouldn't you want to show it off…"

SNIK

"With all due respect," Ryu added, the blade of Kuno's sword now held a little too close to his throat for comfort. 

"Kuno, weren't you just saying you were ok with someone like Ranma hooking up with your sister?" Ryouga inquired. "What's with this then?"

Surprisingly, Kuno smiled and jammed the blade into the ground. Crossing his arms, his smile grew into a smirk.

"Fool!" he remarked, assuming a lecturing tone. "Saotome deserves the affections of my sister, and as I feel no camaraderie towards the knave, so be it. However, to hear one of you make remarks… it is altogether an offense to the sensibilities."

Translation: it's weird to have my friends talking about my little sister.

"One last thing then," Mousse said, unable to help himself. "Ryu. I saw you chatting up Kodachi before. So: her or Ukyou?"

Ryouga sighed at the ever-dumbing-down of the conversation. "Oh, come on!"

"Hmmm…" the Kumon heir pondered the question deeply and thoroughly before answering. "Well, I'd say Kodachi is a little sexier. Plus, you know, the kinkiness, and she has that regal aristocratic thing going on. Ukyou's more like 'girl next door;' she's cuter I guess. I can't say much for Kodachi's personality, since I don't really know her… but in general, I'd take Ukyou there, too."

Kuno growled something inaudible.

"What about you?" Ryu asked. "Shampoo or Ukyou?"

"Shampoo. In a heartbeat."

"Really?"

"Are you kidding?" Mousse cocked his head to the side as he saw Ryu wasn't totally seeing what he meant. "Aside from the fact that I love Shampoo, she beats Ukyou in every category. Her hair is perfect, her eyes are deep enough to get lost in… and she has incredible legs."

"I don't see how they're nicer than Ukyou's. Plus I'm pretty sure Ukyou has bigger tits."

"You know," Ryouga observed. "This is the kind of stupid conversation the girls suspect we have and probably get mad about. Can you imagine what they'd do if they overheard us?"

Kuno didn't agree; he said as much, too. 

"To my regret and eternal trauma, I would share with you this: I have heard my sister speak of boys many times with her earstwhile companions over the phone. Such conversations, overheard only in passing, still chill me to the bone to this day… that fair women of good breeding would speak in such a manner of such debased a subject is most improper."

"Exactly," Ryu echoed the swordsman's sentiments much more clearly and in fewer words. "This isn't some manga where the teenage protagonists have no interest in women. This is real life! And I bet that when the girls get together they talk dirty about us, too."

"When they get together, they probably just fight over Ranma…"

"I would take this moment to speak up for my two loves," Kuno jumped in. "All of you know the fair Akane Tendo… her hair, short or long, is as lustrous as the morning dew catching the first rays of sunlight; her voice is a melody that teases the spirit and taunts the flesh; her eyes are pools of mahogany; in temperament, she is as unpredictable as the most capricious cloud; her embrace is strong, yet soft, gentle, yet firm; she is a most wondrous study in contrasts."

He then went on, as was his way:

"The pigtailed girl is likewise a rare and alluring orchid in the garden of life. She tantalizes by appearing one moment and disappearing the next; to grant her a favor or boon is man's lament, for who could resist her bright blue eyes and exotic garnet locks? Oh, how she teases me… she is like a cherry blossom in winter, a spark of color against a white washed world…"

Kuno took a deep breath, and seeing as he had the attention of his comrades, finished with:

"Finally, let me say that both women possess the most nubile and supple of bodies. I consider myself quite the expert in this, as not only have I a great collection of pictures from which to draw comparison, but first hand experience as well. The pigtailed girl in particular is bounteous in proportions and quite fond of the camera. Akane Tendo, the fierce tigress, is most beautiful when she has worked up a sweat, I find. Less fully endowed, her expressions are as powerful as her blows, and to see them is a wonder."

In the distance, a clump of snow fell from a branch.

"You've thought about this," Ryu noted.

"I have," Kuno proudly admitted. "What say you, Lieutenant? I remember well the fights we have had over Akane Tendo, and you have fought at the pigtailed girl's side many a time. Do you still pine for one of them, or have your eyes fallen nearby but on someone else?"

"It's a sad day when I get subtle jabs from you, Kuno," Ryouga replied, leaning back against his pack and the edge of the crater.

"None-the-less…" the kendost urged him on. And, despite their silence, so did Mousse and Ryu.

"First, let me say this about 'Ranko' – you know what? The body is pretty nice. I said as much when I first saw it. It isn't a bad curse to have at all…" Ryouga's frown slowly gave way to a smirk. "But it looked better on Herb."

Mousse suddenly broke into convulsions of laughter, leaving Ryu and Kuno with question marks over their heads. It was a stupid kind of in-joke, but it had lightened Ryouga's mood enough to talk about stuff he otherwise wouldn't have. He'd never really had friends before, much less other guys who wanted to talk about girls. His only other point of reference, Ranma, tended to complain (or gloat) about them and their attentions more than anything.

"Akane-san's cuter than most people give her credit for, I think," he said, struggling to phrase his thoughts properly. "Kuno's right, actually. She's very expressive: happiness, sadness, compassion… they're all so clear when you look at her. It's her most attractive feature, I guess, even though she… she… she has a very nice body, too. But she's always smiling and kind. And she's got a mean punch."

Ryu made a 'hmm' sound.

Ryouga cut him off. "Before you ask, if I just saw them lined up or something without knowing them beforehand, I'd say Ukyou is probably the most attractive. Provided she's dressed up like a girl and not a boy. I find Shampoo's hair a little too… vivid, and I'd say Ukyou does have bigger… ah… breasts. Which is why she usually binds them. I don't really like showiness, fancy Chinese dresses and stuff; that's Shampoo's only real physical turn off for me."

Mousse seemed mollified by this, and nodded in understanding.

"And what of that avaricious entrepreneur, Nabiki Tendo? I have seen you chatting with her quite often."

Ryouga laughed at the notion, as he did more and more frequently it seemed. "Nabiki's the scariest girl I know. I'd storm an Ethereal battleship by myself before I get on her bad side!"

"Nabiki…" Ryu pursed his lips, considering the unspoken question. "Hard to say. She's always wearing tight business suits and stuff, so she's got that 'secretary' look to her which is pretty sexy. Kind of intimidating, though. So more like a 'secretary who wants your job' kind of sexy. You guys know what I mean."

"She looked good in that bathing suit… back when they had that swimsuit contest at the beach," Mousse remarked, adjusting his fogged over glasses. "Remember that? All the girls were there."

"You don't forget things like that," Ryouga agreed, clearing his throat. "As I recall, Kasumi won that event, didn't she?"

"Ah yes," Kuno mused. "That was an _interesting_ day."

"You three can stop trying to make me jealous, you know!" Ryu fell back, the back of his head resting outside the crater and on a couple inches of white snow. "Man, I did **not** come to Nerima at the right time! Hot springs adventures? Bikini contests? Now **that's** the life of a martial artist!"

The four teammates laughed easily. 

Amid them, Ryouga smiled in true happiness. It had taken years to find a group of friends he actually related to and felt comfortable around. In a way, it was something true to all of them. Mousse was alone even in the Amazon village, rejected by the matriarchal community and shunned by the brow beaten males. Ryu had spent most of his life in brutal training to master the _Yamasenken_, living a life much like Ryouga's own, except by choice and obligation rather than necessity and chance. Even Kuno, pampered rich boy that he was, had only his kendo cronies and dysfunctional family.

'20 percent losses? 20 percent chance of losing a man? No!'

Ryouga's thoughts left no room for doubt. 

'We'll destroy everything in our path, and we'll all make it back!'

* * *


	80. Guns and Roses II

"This is it. Alien Base 17: Codename Alpine Echo Seven."

Ranma stood before the display screen as he had several times before. The two squads were all together, being briefed by their officers together. By now, it was the normal order of things, since all their major operations tended to be done in tandem. They had only shared briefings with the other squads on a few occasions, so when the Lieutenants ordered them to show up, they usually met in the halls and walked over in pairs or triplets. Ranma and Ryouga had been waiting, everything set up, and things had begun without delay.

They were on the verge of Operation Mountain Boomer.

"Doesn't look like much does it?" Ranma turned around and fiddled with his pigtail as he seemed to consider the picture. "Looks kinda like a golf course to me. They got one of those… what's it called? The 'green' in the middle there, and a water hazard…"

"So, yeah. It doesn't look like much!" He turned around again to face the assembled two squads. "But this is it, and tomorrow, we're all going to get to see it first hand. Let's take a look at what Intel has to say about this place."

The slide changed, this time to the same picture, but with captions and markers.

As Ranma went on to explain, the top most part of the base really wasn't much to look at unless you knew what to look for. Just like with UNETCO's bases, the aliens tried to keep theirs hidden underground. The cleared out area, the golf-course sized "green," as Ranma called it, was an open area that Intel believed supported a secondary lift structure in one of the nearby hills. The water hazard was an expanded natural lake that the aliens used as cover for a hangar, flying into or out of the waters in typical UFO fashion. The woods nearby were expected to conceal at least three or four alien patrols at any given time, along with four caches the patrols could fall back on.

Surrounding the area in a slightly broken and uneven square was a fence erected not by aliens, but by the alien's local allies and thralls…

"Now, let's take a moment to look at our other target for Operations Mountain Boomer and Pathfinder," Ranma said, and the slide changed again to show an airstrip and numerous buildings, all surrounded by another fence, and directly adjacent to the 'ant farm' (as many veterans would call the alien base).

"What you're looking at here is a relatively small airbase belonging to the Korean People's Air Force. The limited technical assistance the DPRK gets from sleeping with our alien friends all comes out of this base here. Needless to say, Command intends to send the same message here that they do in every case of collusion."

"We're going to level it," Ryouga explained from his seat nearby. He had a calm, unapologetic look on his face. "Everything they got from the aliens, we're going to destroy. We're going to wipe them off the map."

It was brutal.

Excessive.

It was also a clear cut message to those governments that sold out their humanity and their fellow man for a few shiny trinkets and a couple alien promises that only their neighbors would be harvested in the times to come. As UNETCO members, they were all already subject to immediate detention and execution in North Korea, given its pact with the aliens. Now that the time had come to finally make a big push, XCOM sure as Hell wasn't going to pull its punches. Not with the entire world at stake. If the DPRK didn't like UNETCO operating on its soil, it could feel free to try and stop them.

"You can see outlined here the fuel depot, this is the main air strip, these are hangars, there are four bunkers for the staff and the guard company, this is the supply depot… and this is the separate engineering area with facilities for infiltrators and alien-human hybrids. Communications center, weather station… and these are base defenses in red. Note the surface to air missile batteries, guard stations, and pillboxes…"

"Now, keep this layout in mind," Ranma said, and the slide changed to show another picture of the overall area, including both bases, along with target markers.

"These are the areas Command is going to hit before we land," he explained. "Expect things to be rearranged a bit by the time we make our assault. We should have complete air superiority for the entire mission, so don't worry about missiles or helicopters or anything like that. They might fire off some artillery, though, but there'll always be a ship overhead, so we should be fine. Watch for mortar fire, though."

"We'll be working with Alpha, Beta, Delta and Charlie to clear the area out, while Captain Banks' four squads secure a foothold on the alien base itself. Technically, this is Operation Pathfinder. Once we've secured the area outside the base, and made it impossible for anything to escape, we will participate in Mountain Boomer, which is the final assault on the alien base itself. Colonel Butler will assume operational command, and we'll work with his forces in clearing the mountain. Colonel Kalinowski and the boys and girls from Dongchuan will be our backup."

Ranma looked around to make sure they were all up to par on the overall mission plan. Most of them had their briefing materials laid out before them, and a few – Ryu and Konatsu most specifically – were taking additional notes for themselves.

"Ryouga?"

The lost one stood up and took Ranma's place in front of the screen. "Next we're going to go over our objectives and Operation Pathfinder in detail, starting with a few tertiary targets Intel would like to get their hands on: the airfield chief of staff, political deputy commander, and engineering deputy commander… but before that, there's one special issue we need to talk about."

India Squad's lieutenant looked around the room, seeing a glimmer of confusion on most of their faces. So far, the briefing had gone pretty much as expected, though the operation was far larger than anything they'd been involved in before. Then, suddenly, something 'special' had to be brought up? Of the six, only Mousse and Shampoo knew what he was going to say next.

"Ranma and I both feel it is all but inevitable that some or even all of us could run into the local Trenchard population at this base. These are the martial arts masters that the aliens have corrupted, and experience has taught us both that in these sorts of situations, like will attract like. It isn't in the original battle plan, but… it is prudent for all of us to take steps to prepare for a likely confrontation with these men and women."

He narrowed his eyes, and behind him, the picture changed: to that of a shrunken old woman, juxtaposed with a blurry picture of a raven haired beauty in a rain slicker.

"Cologne," he said, pausing to let the name sink in. "The most powerful martial artist I've ever met. As far as we know, she's already killed Happosai and a dozen others, all at or above our own level of mastery in the Art."

Though half those present never knew Cologne, certainly not like he or Ranma or Shampoo or Mousse did, Ryouga's words and the anxious looks on the faces of their comrades were ample description. The thought of facing Cologne, that ancient master who taught them so much…

"Are any of you scared of this woman?" the lost one asked, pointedly looking from one to the next. "I'll be honest. I am. But if we meet, and if we fight, I have **no** intention of losing. Or dying! And thanks to the diligent work of Mousse and Shampoo, we know what she's capable of, **and** what her weaknesses are. Let's all review this information as if our lives depend on it."

"Who are you kidding?" Ranma interrupted with a rude smirk. "Our lives do depend on it. But I bet you're still looking forward to it anyway."

"Well," Ryouga said with a low chuckle, oversized canines plainly visible. "It just isn't in my nature to run from a fight, no matter how bad the odds. Bet I find her before you do, Saotome…"

Ranma's arrogant grin grew only wider. "We'll see about that, Hibiki."

* * *

Konatsu was sulking.

It wasn't particularly hard to tell. For all his ninja skill and training, the young man tended to wear his emotions on his sleeves. When he was happy, he lit up like a star, and when he was sad, he sputtered like a burned out light bulb. In this case, his moping entailed picking and poking at the meager seafood salad he had picked out from the mess hall's buffet. Sitting across from him, Lieutenant Mario Feretti had long since finished his meal, and had instead taken out his laptop to polish off some work.

It didn't take a mind reader (which Feretti wasn't; his psi strength was above par, but his skills were pretty meager) to see that Konatsu was trawling for some attention and a chance to talk about what was making him miserable. Mario had three children himself, back home in Milan, and one of them just happened to be turning into typically angst-ridden preteen, so he knew the score. What he was waiting for was that unspoken sign that his young friend had finished mulling over what was bothering him, and how he wanted to say his first few words.

Konatsu sighed.

'And there it is!' Lieutenant Feretti slid his laptop out of the way, but didn't close it. Peeking out from behind the back of the screen, and pretending he'd finished whatever work he was engrossed in, he tapped the computer's tablet pen against the scar on his lower lip.

"Something bothering you, Konatsu?"

The sulking ninja poked his salad a little more vigorously.

"Yeah…" he muttered. "I'm just… you can probably guess…"

Mario could, but he didn't.

Instead, he let Konatsu catch his thoughts and continue, "I mean, I told Ukyou I wasn't going to, you know, try and convince her to like me anymore. And I was so sure I meant it when I said it was what I wanted, too, but... I guess I knew Saotome-taichou wasn't interested in her like that, but now…"

The genius ninja impaled a little red cherry tomato.

"I… I can't help feeling a little jealous… like when I heard about the adventures she had with Hibiki-taichou. Yet never once did we do anything like that when I worked with her. I can understand why – he was after Akane and she was after Ranma, so they worked together a few times and they both had goals that sort of complimented each other – but still…! And now Ryu's trying to… to be with her… it's all very frustrating!"

"Konatsu," Mario replied, asking the question seriously, "You're only eighteen. How many guys do you think end up with the first girl they have a thing for?

The younger man could imagine, but he didn't answer.

"Look, you kids are… late bloomers, in a lot of ways. I get that you didn't really have childhoods like most normal people did. But you're adults now, and sometimes things don't work out like you expect them to."

Feretti sighed, and a wan smile crossed his features. "You know I went out with the same girl for more than two years in college. We thought we were in love, but I think it was mostly just the routine that kept it going. It was easy being together with the same person instead of looking for someone new. We'd break up, get together, break up, get together… then, the year before I graduated, I met one of her friends… and six months later we got married. Things work out like we can't imagine. Just don't let the disappointments run your life."

"I wouldn't be getting jealous if my feelings weren't genuine…" the ninja boy started to argue, but his mentor just shook his head.

"Yeah," the older man cut him off. "You would. That's just the way we're hard wired. Besides, how many girls do you even really know? Three?"

"Hey! … more like five…"

"Not counting your step sisters."

"… ok, fine. Two, I guess. But still...!"

Feretti laughed, and finger flicked the corner of Konatsu's plate.

"Let me put it this way, then," he said, glancing over at his laptop. "A man should eat his food, not pick at it. You want something? Get it. Otherwise just leave it for someone else."

Konatsu stared at the tomato impaled on his fork for a few seconds.

"You'll excuse me for saying so, sir, but that advice was vague and not very helpful. Women and food are totally different things." He speared some lettuce and some of the blue cheese dressing and took a somewhat dainty bite.

"…One spoils far more quickly than the other, after all."

"Well!" Mario remarked with a mirthful Mediterranean chuckle. "Maybe you do know something about women after all!"

Konatsu twirled the empty fork between his fingers in a blur of motion.

"I guess I'll just wait and see," he finally decided, his tone still serious but no longer dark with unspoken frustration. "Are you worried about tomorrow, Lieutenant?"

Mario closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and looked up at the ceiling.

"Who wouldn't be?" the question was, of course, rhetorical. "I remember the last base assault I took part in. It was down in the south pacific…"

" Easter Island?" Konatsu guessed.

Mario nodded; a far off look on his face. "I saw three men disappear right in front of me. Golden BB came out of nowhere. We were under psi attack the moment we landed. It… wasn't pretty. Every instinct you have screams at you to stay put, to find cover and trade fire, but there isn't any cover. Not really. The only thing you can do is press forward, keep killing… you advance or you die. In the end… sometimes you're lucky, and sometimes you're not. I think… luck sometimes counts for as much as skill."

He stared at the screen on his computer – at the desktop, with the picture of five people standing on a beach at sunset. For a couple seconds, he thought back to that day. It had been only a few months after he'd been assigned to UNETCO, on his first non-combat rotation…

"Listen to me! Worrying about luck…" he pulled up a folder on the projected layout of the alien base, and the battle to come. "How stupid can you get?"

Konatsu just nodded and finished his food.

'Tonight… I guess I'll just turn in early…'

* * *

Eighteen twenty hours.

Eleven hours and forty minutes prior to Operation Mountain Boomer.

Nabiki stood at the entrance of the dojo's private sparring room, looking down at a pair of brown eyes. Shirokuro stared right back, her tail vigorously wagging back and forth. The black and white dog motioned to the door with her snout and scratched it once. The meaning was clear.

"No wonder that idiot lost track of time!" Nabiki couldn't help but shake her head; without his dog, he really was lost in both time and space.

She checked the door and confirmed it was locked from the inside. Normally, she wouldn't have minded asking him to open the door, but feeling more than a little put out, she just entered his log in and passcode. Which, by the way, wasn't exactly some great secret: what kind of top secret operative of a worldwide alien fighting conspiracy used his numerical birthday as a passcode? Sad, really. Maybe, if she felt generous, she'd point that fact out to him sometime… after she had a good idea what code he'd replace it with, of course.

The exotic alloy door unlocked and retracted into the walls with a secure "cha chunk!" Being only a minimally secure door, it used a standard electromechanical lock. Inside, she saw the object of her aggravation standing in the middle of the room. All around him were a dozen or more pieces of paper – on the floor, walls, and even the ceiling. Four machines stood on tripods in the four corners of the room, doing what, she couldn't tell.

Ryouga glanced over his shoulder with no small amount of surprise.

"Nabiki?" he asked, and went back to the diagram on the floor. "What are you doing here? And how did you get in…?"

"You didn't lock the door, Ryouga-kun," she lied, and then added with more than a little reprimand. "And its 6:20."

"Already?" he stood up, and turned to face her. "I guess I… ah…"

"Lost track of time?"

"Ha ha ha," he intoned humorlessly. "Just give me a second to turn this stuff off."

"What are you doing in here, anyway?" she asked, approaching one of the tripod devices. "You're supposed to be relaxing a bit. Isn't that what you told everyone else?"

He shrugged, and quickly moved to get to the device before she could.

"I just wanted to finish this up…" he explained, as he turned the machine off. "I have a responsibility to document my techniques."

She left him to the contraption, probably some sort of sensor or spectroscope, and kneeled down to get a close look at one of the pieces of paper. She couldn't read the characters on it, though, and it looked like the ink had been distorted somehow. It wasn't Japanese, at least. She took a guess.

"What's with the paper? Some sort of pa-k'ua divination?"

"Oho?" he made an impressed sound, half born of shock and half born out of happy realization. "It is! I didn't know you knew anything about Feng Shui!"

"It used to be 'cool' to know about it when I was little," she replied offhand. "And Daddy has all sorts of weird books and scrolls he inherited from the old man…."

'Old man" meaning Happosai, which in turn meant most of the scrolls and books had probably been stolen from various monasteries and other archives. Naturally, Nabiki had had them appraised some time ago. Still, just because she could recognize a little and guess accurately, didn't mean she really knew any of the intricacies. All that mumbo jumbo was so outdated, now. Her father believed in it though, thinking it brought some sort of 'harmony' to the dojo when they did remodeling. Which was often.

"You're lucky! I wish I'd had that much passed onto me when I was younger!" Ryouga ducked down and picked up one of the pieces of paper. "I picked up a little here and there in my travels, but I only recently thought to use it in my training. With these papers, I can chart the flow of my ki and…"

"Ryouga-kun," she cut him off, not wanting to endure a long and far too in-depth discussion on esoteric martial arts. "The time?"

"That's right! Sorry," he quickly apologized, and started to collect the papers. For a few seconds, Nabiki just stood by and watched, but then she joined in. Not out of altruism, but just to save time. As he then moved to turn off the tripod sensors, she examined another of the pieces of paper.

'Using these to chart the flow of ki?' she wondered, noting the direction of the smeared ink. 'I don't think I've heard of that before. It must be part of that research project he never goes into detail about…I wonder if its related to the martial arts calligraphy I've seen him practicing?'

Not that she _really_ cared about the martial arts stuff and how time consuming it was, but a part of her was still curious. The Tendos were a martial arts family, and seeing the lost boy (or Ranma) training so annoyingly hard always reminded her of when she was little. The feelings those memories carried were mixed: happiness and bitterness, mostly. In the end, none of her daddy's girls had quite been able to live up to his expectations in the Art. Though he had never said as much, she knew it was true. Still, it hadn't all been long hours and hard work, there had been those fleeting moments of pride and expectant accomplishment…

"I'll need to finish this later, so we can just leave these here…" Ryouga patted one of the tripods. "That should do it! Let's head over…"

"Not like that you're not!" she tossed the handful of papers at him, and he deftly caught them in midair with his free hand.

"What?" he asked. "What's wrong?"

"You're as sweaty as a pig!"

"Pigs don't sweat, they use mud or water to cool off," he corrected her, but became abruptly uncomfortable immediately afterward. "It's just an expression. I know."

"… you know a lot about pigs, I've noticed."

"Ah…" a prominent sweat drop inched down his brow. "I did work at a pig farm, you know."

It is worth noting here that while Ryouga Hibiki was normally a functionally impotent liar, particularly when it came to women, years of hiding his Jyusenkyou curse had honed that one very specific survival instinct to a razor's edge. Either that or he had uncanny luck when it came to girls simply being unable to figure things out despite how bloody obvious they actually were.

"Well," Nabiki, amazingly, continued talking none-the-wiser. "You're going to be late at this rate, and I don't think Ranma will let you hear the end of it when he finds out."

"This is a lot of trouble to see some stupid movie…" the lost one grumbled, but hastily headed for the door at the thought of his rival poking yet more fun at him. Nabiki just shook her head and urged him on as she led him back to his room. Along the way, the middle Tendo daughter mentally lamented the work she put into getting such a pig headed martial artist to socialize, even for his own good. Such were charity cases, however, and with his recent promotion she was sure he was a long term investment that would pay off in good time.

At the door, she'd almost made the mistake of opening it herself.

Luckily, she caught herself and let him use his secure ID card to key it open. His high security passcode had been much harder to figure out, after all, and it wouldn't do to let slip that she knew that one, too. Not that she would abuse that knowledge… it was just _useful_ to have, just in case it became _necessary _to have. Ryouga stepped in, carefully put his papers on his word desk, and headed off towards the privacy curtain by his bed. The layout of his room was pretty much the same as hers, and Kuno's, and almost everyone else. A few paired rooms had a door between them, like with Nodoka, Genma and Ranma, and she had heard that the Command staff (Colonels and the Commander) had impressive accommodations with a totally separate bedroom, bathroom and a study.

A moment later she heard running water, and gave the screen a glance. Of course, she couldn't see anything, but that didn't mean she wouldn't try anyway. Ranma and Ryouga were both pretty easy on the eyes, at least compared to the guys she'd run across over the years. They also tended to be annoyingly modest… the exception being when Ranma was in his girl form, since he had the habit of wandering around topless as if he were still a guy. While she'd been able to get that modesty to work in her favor, as it drove up the prices of the racy pictures she'd taken of them over the years, it also made getting those pictures more difficult. Thinking back to it, she fondly remembered when she'd snapped that picture of Ryouga trying to choke Ranma to death in the dojo, their clothes mysteriously wet and torn up.

'Kind of gay, but…' Well, there had been plenty of female classmates willing to part with their hard earned money for a little bishy fanservice. 'What had he been saying back then? _Damn you Ranma! Stop calling me that in front of Akane! _It was something like that.'

Regardless, familiarity seemed to breed out most of the prudishness. She took another look at the back of the room, and the blurry curtain. She could see his bed in an indistinct way, but without x-ray vision to see through the wall any real peeking was basically impossible. No doubt even the slightest rustle of the curtain would send him into a panic, too. Which _would_ be amusing, but…

Instead, she focused her attention on his computer.

Turning on the monitor, she saw with some dismay that he still had a totally uncreative screen saver on it. In fact, it was probably the default one the boys down at IT had assigned. Who else actually used the little twisting pipes? She knew one of the more popular ones around the base was the SETI online screen saver, mostly due to the irony of it all. Nabiki had gotten a custom one where different currencies morphed into one another. True, most people rolled their eyes when they saw it, but she thought it was very pretty.

She resisted touching any of the keys. There was no point and no time to fiddle with it anyway. Part of Ryouga's maximum security password was randomly generated, and really the only way she'd figure it out would be to milk the information out of him. It hadn't been forthcoming. She'd even thought about not prying that deeply into his affairs. The challenge of it all was very tempting, but she couldn't go on like she had before. There had to be some boundaries this time…

She busied herself looking around for a few minutes, until the water turned off and she heard him step out and into the bathroom floor. Examining a strange wooden box with an _ofuda_ seal on it, she took the opportunity (while it was on her mind, and while he was sort of indisposed) to ask a question.

"Ryouga-kun. What do you want for Christmas?"

His voice came from the bathroom. "Christmas?"

"Yeah," she replied, putting the mystery box back on the shelf. "You know. Santa Claus and the birth of this Jewish guy, I think his name was Jesus or something. That holiday?"

"I know what Christmas is! Are you and Kasumi hosting another party this year?" He chuckled softly as he thought up a little quip of his own. "It's unlike you to buy other people stuff. Last year, didn't you just give everyone a one month interest-free extension on their loans?'

She laughed, too. "And that act of unparalleled generosity cost me a lot of money!"

"Maybe I'll just get you some coupons then."

"Coupons!" Nabiki tried to sound as if she actually wanted them. "A girl's best friend! You're so practical, Ryouga-kun! So what do you want? And keep it under five dollars."

"The last Christmas present I got were stickers for my lunchbox. A lunchbox I lost in the Gobi desert."

"Are you saying you want a new lunchbox?"

"That's exactly what I'm saying. I want a Transformers lunchbox."

"Those are like fifty dollars on eBay," she replied, quite enjoying the banter. Ryouga had proved to be a better source of it than she had ever expected. Usually he was too indignant with Ranma-related outrage or too befuddled by Akane-related infatuation to have much of a talk with.

"I guess I'll just try and surprise you," she decided on. "Something cheap, yet homicidal."

It took a second or so for him to think up a good reply. She didn't mind. What mattered more was that he tried. Kuno could banter pretty well, too, but he usually didn't want to put much effort into it. Eventually he just grunted in annoyance and told her to get to the point and stop beating around the bush and/or cheating him out of his money. Mousse had a sharp wit, too, but she found it hard to develop much of a repertoire with. He tended to prefer silence around strangers.

"And I'll get you something with high resale value," he joked, a couple seconds before he emerged wearing some rather familiar clothes. It was the 'mustard' yellow sleeveless ensemble he liked to wear back in Nerima. He'd gotten changed amazingly quickly, and she'd meant to lay in a joke about it, but another comment emerged before she could catch herself.

"I haven't seen those in a while," she remarked, without even thinking about it. With the words out in the open, though, she suddenly found them surprisingly intimate, for lack of a better word. Like she knew him back then in the same way she thought she knew him now.

"Most of my stuff is actually out being cleaned, so…" he shrugged. The relatively small combat population – in fact the entire population – of Seiran were generally expected to take care of their own laundry, rather than have uniforms and the like collected in bulk. It reduced the number of personnel needed, among other costs, and the whole thing was tied into the base's state of the art recycling system.

"I'm surprised you don't have Shirokuro do your laundry," she joked, glad to get past the 'seen those in a while' comment.

"She already cooks and cleans, so laundry is the least I could do," he smiled at that, appearing quite proud of his cleverness. He was holding up pretty well so far today.

"Ok! Let's get going!" she said, leading him to the door where Shirokuro sat, watching them with doggy patience, her head between her paws. Nabiki scratched the dog behind her ears while Ryouga slipped his shoes back on. On the verge of leaving, Nabiki caught a look at herself in one of the room's mirrors. She'd arranged to have some clothes brought in with the latest base shipment, including a new soft-blue poplin blouse with poet sleeves. Unlike certain martial artists, both male _and_ female, she understood the benefits of a diverse and appropriate wardrobe (that didn't involve Chinese dresses and variations on the cooking apron and little else).

They walked side by side, alone in the hall, and right away Nabiki noticed something seemed to be on her associate's mind. With Ryouga it was often difficult to guess exactly what he was thinking about… at least it became that way once he started thinking about more than just beating Ranma, losing Akane, and cursing the existence of aliens. Her first guess was that he was still thinking about his work, and that thought in turn made her a little irritated.

Their work was important – critically important – but they were off duty now, and looking as a very threatening battle tomorrow. They had just a few hours before everyone had to get to sleep and prepare for tomorrow morning, both mentally and physically. That was just a small window of opportunity, in the whole day, to be with friends or family and remember just what they were risking their lives to protect. She'd read reports on how, especially in the first year of operation, the stresses of mental attack and physical danger had cracked so many hardened veterans of more conventional fighting. At least a sliver of daily rest and relaxation was all but mandatory.

"Nabiki," he finally said, just as she was contemplating how to provoke him into lightening his mood. He sounded typically serious, but it was quite a change compared to just a little while before when they had been joking back and forth in his room.

"What?" she asked, and gently nudged him with her elbow. "Spit it out, already!"

"Nabiki," he said her name again, working up towards what he had to really say, "You're… you know, you've been acting a little different, ah, since we got here."

"Really?"

"Well, you've still been pretty money obsessed and greedy," he admitted, and she pouted at how he said it like it was a bad thing. "But you've been… well nicer. To me at least."

"So?" she asked. Pointedly.

"So… you know…"

"No. I don't know."

It appeared then that he had noticed the tone in her voice.

"Look," he began again, trying to sound more conciliatory. "I'm not complaining or anything, but to be honest… I mean, you're being nicer to me than I think you've been to most of the people back in Nerima."

"I treat my friends well," she replied after a few long seconds. "You just never met any of them."

He glanced at her, but didn't stare.

"I'm not a bad person," she blurted out, not liking the critique he was directing at her. Even silently.

"I know you're not," he replied, and for some reason it felt really good to hear. She closed her eyes for a step or two as they walked.

"Nabiki," he continued, while her eyes were still closed. "Do you…?"

"Want to talk about anything? No," she answered.

Then:

"Maybe. …Yes. I don't…" she caught her breath, and sighed. Looking at him, she saw he'd stopped walking, pausing to let her catch her running thoughts. She stopped walking, too, and faced the usually lost boy, who, just this once, seemed to have been right on target. "What makes you think something happened?"

"'I'm not a bad person,'" he repeated, watching her with a measure of understanding. "You've said that a few times. And I know what it sounds like… when you say things more to yourself than to others."

She frowned, but only a little. "You're more perceptive than you look."

"Not really…" he muttered for lack of a reply.

Nabiki looked down the hall, and in that split second, she made a decision. Taking his hand, she pulled him over to the emergency stairwell near the elevators. Opening the door (which, despite the warning sticker, did not trigger an alarm) they had a measure of privacy to talk. Most people didn't bother with the stairs, even though access had been changed to unrestricted just weeks after the base had been built.

"Promise me nothing I say here ever leaves this stairwell, Ryouga-kun." In fact, she was already composing just how she would say what she now felt she had to say. "Actually, there are too many loopholes in that, so maybe…"

"Nabiki," he interrupted, saving her from starting to fumble. "I won't tell anyone."

She couldn't help still feeling a little anxious. "…Make it a martial arts vow. The kind you can't break. Ever. No matter what!"

His frown drew down just a little. He'd likely had experience with those sorts of promises, and didn't take them lightly.

"I won't," he said it like it was a vow. A martial arts vow he would die before breaking. The kind that he would destroy man and machine to protect.

He was just that kind of honorable martial arts idiot.

"Thank you. Ryouga-kun…" She took a deep breath. Nabiki knew what she wanted to say, but knowing it and doing it were very different when push came to shove. She was afraid, and not just of what telling this secret to someone would do to her carefully cultivated sense of personal security. She'd never been the type to have friends worth confessing to, and she'd never really felt the need for it before, but now… she badly needed someone to trust.

"I… I did something bad at Meiji," she began, licking her lips and fighting with herself to admit it.

She looked over his shoulder at the door, and bit her lip.

" Meiji University?" he asked, mostly to prompt her to continue.

"Yeah. Meiji University…" she took another deep breath. It was a little easier, once she'd started. "When I got there, I… I did a lot of the things you probably heard about back at Furinkan. No one knew me there, and Kuno-chan wasn't around, so…. I got a little… greedy. The people there had so much more money, and they started off so gullible… I mean, as gullible as you, even!"

"Gee, thanks."

She laughed weakly, and pressed on. "I knew this girl there. She was the kind of girl you'd probably like: nice, and polite, and kind and very, well, girly. The kind who'd go 'eee' if she saw a mouse or something. I could tell that she was hiding something, though, so I got to know her. We hung out, sort of became friends, but not great friends. At a party I found some stuff about her… some stuff about her I could _use_."

Ryouga closed his eyes briefly; she could tell that he had some idea of where this was going. But having started, she knew she had to finish. She **had** to.

"I… I won't say what I found out, but I tried to use the information… to get her to work for me, do me favors, things… things like that. She tried to get me in trouble but I had my bases covered, you know? I got… she made me angry, and I… I just wanted to teach her a lesson! I mean, she tried to get me expelled!" As she spoke, her voice rose with anger, but there were tears in her eyes. She wiped them away, hard, ashamed and angry that they were there, betraying her.

"I didn't want… I…"

She took a ragged breath meant to calm her, to steady and control herself.

"She jumped off a building, and…"

"No one…" she screwed her eyes shut, hiding the tears behind her hands. "No one ever did that before! No one ever did that before! I didn't know it would happen! You have to believe me! No one ever did that before!"

"Nabiki…" he tried to say, tried to think up something appropriate. His lips moved a few times, but no words came. She'd expected him to at least reel back in shock and disgust, to see her for what she had done, but his expression remained inscrutable to her. Was it because he'd killed people, too? Was it because he didn't understand just how terrible it had been to hear the news shouted down the dorm room hall, and know deep down that he had driven an innocent person to suicide? Had all those depression powered _ki_ blasts addled him to human suffering in general?

"I was so scared!" she gasped and turned away from him to hide her face. She couldn't stand that impassive expression! It wasn't what she deserved. It wasn't! She wanted to yell at him to be angry, or shocked, or disgusted or …anything!

"I panicked… if anyone found out… I…! So I… I arranged it to look like two other girls had done it! I ruined their lives so… so I wouldn't get in trouble, and… and I killed someone…" she choked back the words, but they came out again, almost painfully, "I killed…!"

Ryouga's experience with the opposite sex may have been minimal, but he knew when to shut up, and when to try and comfort someone. He didn't try and explain away what she had done. He didn't try and justify it, or say it wasn't her fault. He took her by the shoulders and let her cry into his shirt. Buried in his chest, Nabiki sobbed, lost in the cathartic release of finally being able to share what she'd done with someone else. It hadn't just ruined three lives.

Just a freshman in college, she'd all but sensed her own oncoming pariah status and had felt powerless to stop it. Even at home, pretending her studies were going as well as her grades indicated, she'd seen her future, and it wasn't what she wanted it to be. The collapse could well have been weeks away, or even months, but by the time that alien light had streamed through her window in Nerima, Nabiki Tendo's life had already been spiraling out of control. Struggling to keep it to herself, to handle it herself, she hadn't dared even hint about her culpability in the tragedy to her family.

Not to Kasumi, so good, so kind, so gentle – the perfect and dutiful daughter.

Not to Akane, so popular, so beloved, so young – the baby daughter and dojo heir.

And certainly not to her emotional and high strung father.

To her, that terrible night, that alien ship, had been the greatest opportunity of her life. It had taken her away from that place, away from the fear and the uncertainty and the guilt. It had taken her somewhere where she could do good, atone, and yes: do well for herself, too. And she would do good; she would atone, so why had she bared her most shameful secret to… to anyone? Why did it feel so good to finally, finally, be able to tell someone?

"I'm sorry…" she cried into him, the one person, against all circumstance she felt she could trust. He could never forgive her, couldn't absolve her of her guilt, but maybe, just maybe, he could sympathize with her and not hate her for her something horrible that she truly regretted. She'd seen how he had changed, and it had given her hope that she could change too.

"I never meant for this to happen…"

"I know," he said, his voice soft enough to hear the compassion in it. But at the same time, it offered no platitudes. No emotional escapes from responsibility. Still, she found comfort in it, and she knew he wouldn't tell anyone, wouldn't turn against her, wouldn't curse her behind her back.

"Thank you. Ryouga-kun…" she stayed in his arms just long enough to start to compose herself again. She hated getting emotional – there was never any profit in it, and it made others think you weak and lacking in conviction. Even towards someone who had truly saved her life, in almost every way, she didn't want to seem unable to deal with her problems on her own. He let her go, and the two stood in the growing silence.

It soon became clear that, more than anything, he had no idea what to say.

And after telling him what she'd done, neither did she.

* * *

"Look at this!" Ryu checked his watch, and not for the first time. "I thought Nabiki and Ryouga were coming."

Standing next to him, Ukyou crossed her arms under her chest. She'd gone out of her way to look as boy-like as possible, even tying her hair together at the bottom instead of close to the back of her head. Not that Ryu had seen cause to complain.

"The movie's about to start," she said, checking her own sports watch. "And I don't think we can have half the base wait for them."

"I guess not," Ryu replied with a casual shrug. He'd dressed casually in jeans and a shirt… after nervously changing his clothes four or five times and cursing loudly in his room once or twice.

"Should we go in?" he asked, coughing to clear his throat. They were standing outside the conference room that the recreation and support staff had appropriated for this week's show. Ukyou's 'half the base' remark had been a total exaggeration, but more than a few groups of friends and pairs of 'friends' had shown up. It was XCOM tradition to show a particularly stupid and usually alien-related movie before any base assault.

"Might as well. The jackass probably got lost or something!" Ukyou turned to head inside. "They could be in Mexico by now."

Another _slight_ exaggeration.

"So who is M. Night Shyamalan anyway?" she asked, as stepping through the door.

"Some American director I think."

"You **do** know this isn't a date right?"

"It's absolutely not a date."

"..."

"I'll just shut up then…"

* * *

**Somewhere within the Changbai Mountain Range**

Above ground, the wail of sirens filled the breaking dawn air.

And deep within the bowels of the alien base, a pair of eyes leisurely opened, accompanied by a picture perfect smile.

"Ah," a dulcet voice remarked in the dark. "It's about time my cute little students came to see me."


	81. The Big Show I

**Author's Note**: _As the previous chapter was two "parts" instead of three, this chapter is "four" parts, and thus a little longer than normal (though the previous chapter was actually normal length, and not shorter). _

* * *

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. Despite a surge of activity in the Far East theatre, and fierce battles waged to unseat the Sirius Conspiracy and avenge the loss of the Joketsuzoku village, UNETCO and the two new squads have prevailed time and time again. With the threat of Cologne and other second generation Trenchards (alien human hybrids) looming ahead, the high command readies for a strike at one of the planet's last remaining alien bases. For India and Juliet squads, confrontation with these corrupted master martial artists is inevitable. Finally, the last great push to drive the entrenched alien presence off-Earth has begun. Only with that done, can XCOM bring the fight to the stars.

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia**

Chapter XXVIII

_The Big Show_

* * *

Written by:

Capn Chryssalid

* * *

Seiran Mountain

Nabiki took a few extra seconds and finished writing before she stood up to leave. Around the large rectangular meeting table the more experienced members of the Command and Control facility were already heading towards the room's shaded glass door. They were all support staff; the only person with a rank present was the Commander. She still sat at the head of the table, one hand supporting her chin and the other hovering over a small portable keyboard: mostly clear save for the white toned keys. The Commander had used it during the teleconferencing they'd had with the staff at Dongchuan and Irkutsk.

The scale of the operation involved three bases, from three different countries: the command staff from all three had to be integrated together for it to work. Luckily, just as XCOM had a clear regional command hierarchy for its military members, each base was both self sufficient and easily capable of operating as part of a single broader network. Seiran, as the largest base and seat of Regional Command: Far East, would be the operational hub. And Nabiki would be right in the middle of it.

Swiveling out of her seat and retrieving the quick notes she'd jotted down during the briefing, she joined the rest of Seiran's Squad Coordination Department. They were all part of the General Intelligence section of Command and Control, including SigINT, HUMINT, IMINT and the other dataminers. Only interrogations were handled by a separate branch of the department, one called Special Research and Intelligence, which also handled most of the psionic related Intel duties (including, it was rumored, spying on everyone else). _Those_ people weren't present except for Director Weissman, but many of the techs from Networking and Information Control were slipping out of the room to their desks. Theirs was arguably the hardest job of them all: to keep the world from knowing about the secret war raging sporadically across the planet and in its skies.

Since her transfer to GenIntel, Nabiki's superior had been a serious looking older woman named Rebecca Woomer, from America. She was a "Director" like Weissman, and just like him she answered directly to the base Commander. She was also fairly new, having transferred in from outside the organization only six months ago. Weissman, in contrast, had been Director at Seiran since its Alien Containment facility came on line, years ago, and while Weissman's personality could be called frosty at best, Rebecca seemed far more personable and engaging. She always kept a level head, and she'd been willing to let Nabiki take a chance at Consulting for India Squad during the doppelganger mess.

Nabiki liked her. In fact, she had good feelings about most of the people she worked with. Standing to her side, and trailing slightly behind the group as it headed out, Nabiki saw Rachael Glascoe, the woman who had been initially assigned to both India and Juliet Squads. She was Caucasian, like almost everyone at Seiran, around thirty or thirty one, with wavy dark red hair cut short and librarian-like glasses. She struck Nabiki as the "quietly competent" sort, who just tried to do a good job without standing out, messing up, or speaking much. She had been sadly unprepared for the sort of micromanagement that India Squad (and especially its lieutenant) required.

Honestly, it was amazing that Ryouga had managed his directional problem so well for so long without panicking or causing a scene. Luckily, Nabiki had been close by when he'd gotten lost, and her quick thinking had worked out instead of backfiring. She already worked as an assistant in General Intelligence, so volunteering to help with India Squad was an easy step up. Conveniently, it only entailed actually doing more work during missions. It would also be nice (or so she thought) to be that little bit closer to the action and to the people out doing the fighting.

She nodded to Gary and Terri and the two Consultants returned the polite gesture. They were in their thirties, too, and Gary was the only guy in their group of six. Nabiki wasn't sure if there was some physiological aspect to it, but all but two squads from Seiran had female Consultants working for them. The ratio was a contrast to the fact that the vast majority of soldiers in the squads were male. Nabiki felt a bump as someone slipped by her and her mind fell back, almost instantly, to an old vengeful default.

Reiko Marume.

Fate would see to it that the only other Japanese woman around (beside the Commander of course) was someone she simply couldn't work with. Reiko reminded her of Hinako-sensei: she was arrogant, over-assertive, with a chip dangerously balanced on her shoulder. She was the youngest in the group, next to Nabiki, with long dark hair done up in a bun and an athletic body that contrasted sharply with most of her peers. For her part, Nabiki had no idea what she had done to irk the other woman. Hell, she'd been on what was probably the best behavior of her life the last few months! She hadn't even transferred over to General Intelligence until recently.

Still, there would be time to find out about that later. And, if necessary… well, she wouldn't DO anything serious, but she'd arm herself as appropriate in case a squabble occurred. …Out of self defense.

Heading down the stairs with the others, towards 'the Floor' – the large open area where they all worked – Nabiki couldn't help but imagine what Ryouga would think, if he somehow knew what she was considering. Especially after last night. But it wasn't blackmail or anything like that. She just needed to know why this co-worker was so contrarian, and if there was anything that could be done about it, _if the need should arise_. It was a totally different situation.

Totally different.

Her workstation was little changed from before; the real difference was in what she did, rather than what she did it with. There was no real organization to her station; she left papers or notes or printouts wherever they were conveniently close at hand. Her memory was always sufficient to remember where something was, even if it wasn't in any place obvious. Activating the little telecom next to her monitor, she let the little teleconference device boot up while she attended to her real work.

Settling into her chair, she started up the squad communication program on the main monitor directly in front of her. UNETCO used a combination of human adapted hyperwave technology and radio for communications purposes, and moments after processing her log in and clearance the program launched. Several windows opened up, displaying information on Smartlinked equipment. Four video feeds also appeared, displaying inactive text. All were accompanied by audio waveforms indicating silence, with the record features similarly disabled.

Slipping on her headset and adjusting the microphone, she cleared her throat and spoke up.

"Hey, lost boy! You listening?"

A few seconds passed, and Nabiki pursed her lips in irritation; obviously India Squad hadn't activated their comms yet. The 'lost boy' thing was always guaranteed to get a response; usually some variant of 'can you please not call me that' but occasionally the more waggish 'I'm not lost… right now anyway.' Nothing to be done about it if they weren't ready, though. Switching to the other monitor that rested at a slight angle, to her right of the primary, she quickly brought up a display indicating their position.

It was similar to one of the displays on one of the big screens on the wall. That one showed the location and vectors of all the relevant air traffic from Beijing to the Sea of Japan. Most of it was ghosted and partly transparent. That was the civilian traffic. This left military and government traffic highlighted, along with XCOM craft. The sky was clear of alien-made UFOs, at least for the moment, and on one of the blue dots India Squad had to be preparing for the fight of their lives.

With a little time to kill, Nabiki brought up the manifest of the craft they were on. India wasn't the only Squad going in with Operation Pathfinder. Akane and Golf Squad were in the same Avenger, speeding towards the enemy. Reflecting on her little sister, Nabiki knew that a part of her wasn't just worried for her safety, but jealous of her, too. Even if she wanted to put herself in harm's way, Nabiki could never – would never – understand the sort of battle-mindedness that so many of her peers engaged in. There was the thrill of competition, yes, but the violence of it all was rather off-putting. Noting the manifest, and the equipment list that had been logged when it left base, Nabiki took some time to look up any other relevant information that she would need, or that India Squad would request.

Sooner rather than later, she heard a beep and a short burst of static as one of the audio lines activated. Video was still off line, though.

"…six fourteen hours. Watchmen One through Four are on line. I am now activating India Squad."

"There you are, lost boy," Nabiki quickly said, turning to the primary monitor.

"Don't call me that, 'mercenary girl.'"

"You picked that up from Shampoo."

"…Nabiki," Ryouga's tone became serious again.

"Right, right. Good morning to you, too." She kept her smile; business was business and all that. "Everything looks good here, Lieutenant Hibiki. Patching India in."

One by one, the other India Squad members synched up. First Mousse, then Ryu, then Kuno. The system uploaded data from their armor, running a steady stream of four diagnostic tables with real time updates regarding physiology and other information from those sensors that had been activated. A number were still off line though, just like the video feed, and the equipment list was incomplete.

"When you guys are ready, let's plug in your gear, ok?"

"We're almost ready," Ryouga assured her.

"She can probably guess who were waiting up on," Ryu added, speaking up over the teamcomm for the first time.

"Hey!" another voice grumbled, "You think this is easy? There's a lot of stuff in here!"

"I wouldst ask if that chicken you pulled out before is smartlinked as well," Kuno joked, much to his teammates' amusement. Well, two of them anyway.

"It will be when I get the _laser beams_ for its eyes."

Nabiki chuckled softly as the boys laughed, checking up the equipment manifest. Mousse had indicated quite the… diverse range of weaponry brought on board. How he could even move carrying so much, she couldn't fathom. Then again, all the boys were pretty superpowered in that regard. They could handle a vehicle class heavy weapon as easily as a man in powered armor. Easier, even.

"There we go!" Mousse finally exclaimed. "Ok. I'm ready."

"Loading," Nabiki announced, and brought up their personal weapons. All the Smartlinked equipment immediately registered, confirming that it came from the Armory, that it was checked out under a certain name and Squad, that it was loaded, and that it was cleared to be used. It was a lot of trouble, but Nabiki could imagine the fracas that could arise from someone 'losing' a plasma pistol during a Terror Site or in the middle of a cornfield. UNETCO ran a tight ship. There was also the matter of security, secrecy aside…

"It all looks good," she observed, and couldn't resist adding, "No weaponized chickens, though."

"Don't tell them that! It ruins the surprise!"

"Ok, let's get these buckets on," Ryouga interrupted, referring to their helmets. Which meant she'd be getting that video feed, finally.

"Nabiki," he continued, "Pull up details on the initial attack. I'd like a map of the area uploaded to us as soon as it becomes available, along with any other surprises before we land."

"On it," she replied, loading up the information. It'd be sent over to their HUDs as soon as the video was up. Looking up, briefly, at the sound of Director Woomer's voice, she checked the big screen. Sure enough, more than a few red dots appeared between the XCOM craft and their target.

"Looks like you guys have some company…"

"UFOs?" Ryouga asked.

"Doesn't look like it. Says here they're Mig-29s."

"Nothing to worry about then. We probably won't even feel a bump when we run them over."

* * *

Once on the ground, Pathfinder was proving to be more interesting than expected.

Or perhaps the better word would be: 'unconventional.'

The once orderly airbase was no more. In its place, men fought over a cratered Hell of burning wrecks, thick with enough smoke to blot out the sky. Anything and everything on the surface during the first two minutes of the attack had been destroyed by flights of XCOM Firestorms. The air and space superiority craft had been undeterred by the meager and half hearted aerial resistance that scrambled, at the last second, to try and defend the target. They then turned laser and plasma towards the Earth.

Beams had burned holes through vehicles, or neatly bisected them easier than a knife cutting through gelatin, leaving the two halves to rest side by side, engulfed by flames. Low powered plasma shattered bunkers like so much kindling, strewing charred glassy remains of reinforced concrete for half a mile in every direction. Within that initial conflagration, explosions tore through barbed wire, fences, gate and guard houses, and the burning remains. Munitions cooked off, mines were scattered like dry leaves, and then the landings began.

And about three minutes later, it got _crazy_.

"Hardsuit!"

Through the smoke, a heavy metal trunk emerged and sank into the ground, oblivious to, or just unfazed by, the burning oil all around it. It was vaguely leg shaped, with a large metallic shin guard that covered the upper thigh. Emblazoned on the guard was a red star in a white circle, within another red square, a stripe of blue above and below. It was only the first of many icons of the flag, all to decorate what was probably considered by many to by the most advanced war machine on the planet.

To someone who had seen real powered armor, however, it was an ungainly beast. The articulation on the "legs" were stout, but it fit the overall design: a slightly sloped but generally rectangular casing made up the heavily armored "torso," with a single red lens set in the upper middle. Two arms stuck straight out, one bracing and supporting a massive cannon clearly also integrated into the main body, and another more mobile appendage with several smaller weapons systems attached. It didn't move particularly quickly, but that wasn't its purpose – it pivoted slightly and hunkered down, becoming a very solid and imposing block of metal that was still more than seven feet high.

The minigun mount on its left arm began to spin.

"Would you look at that? A genuine mecha!!"

A flash of black and white twisted through the smoke, emerging like a ghost from behind the burning hulk of a North Korean tank. It, too, was something of a custom model, but it had been conspicuous enough to get picked off from the air while still loitering at the motor pool. Whatever weapons and defenses it had had, alien upgraded or not, had been of no use against the initial laser bombardment from some thirty miles away. It may have failed at defending the facility that built it, but Mousse found it convenient cover.

Two flashes of fire and light streaked out before he even hit the ground. Nearly invisible wires connected the missiles to their launchers, one in each of the Hidden Weapons Master's hands. They took all of a second to reach their target, the MK-301A high explosive anti tank warheads exploding with jets of fire powerful enough to cut through four hundred millimeters of rolled homogeneous steel. Through the smoke and fire came the reply: the roar of a three barreled minigun's electric motor, firing some nine hundred 20 millimeter armor piercing rounds per minute.

Mousse chuckled mirthfully as he ducked back behind another nearby tank carcass. Shells pinged and pockmarked its already stressed and ruined hide, but safe for the moment, Mousse held out his arms and retracted the two three-and-a-half foot long missile launchers back into the bottomless sleeves of the robes he wore over his armor.

"Got the location?" he asked, as the fire died down.

"Got it," Ryouga's voice came over the comm. "Nabiki! Forward it! Ten seconds!"

What one XCOM trooper saw, Command and Control saw. And what Command and Control wanted leveled, annihilated, or yes: even captured, could be rapidly disseminated down the ranks. The exact location of the North Korean Hardsuit was already on its way up and down the chain of Command. Not that Mousse could afford to just stand still and wait. That prickle of danger, his well honed _sakkijutsu_, told him to move, and so he did at a speed virtually no other human being could match.

A wail filled the air, and behind him, the crippled battle tank tilted up and rolled over from the force of a blow. An imperceptible instant into the destruction, the roar of a sonic boom drowned out all other noise. Holding out his arm, Mousse's sleeves shifted, spitting a new weapon out and into his hands. Across the battlefield, the Korean Hardsuit continued to pivot, the torso section traversing to the left as it opened fire with its minigun, the cannon on its other side still glowing neon blue and white hot from the previous discharge. In the distance, a thunderous explosion erupted upwards like a fountainhead.

Legs pumping in midair, Mousse hit the ground running even as he leveled his plasma carbine and took a snap shot at the nearby behemoth. His was no cheap knock off or hand-me-down. A Christmas bundle of superheated plasma and bottled anti-matter hit the Hardsuit just above the articulation joint that connected to the main body. Metal distorted and vaporized in the ensuing flash of heat and radiation, but ruggedness of design kept it firing, though off target. 20mm minigun rounds perforated a smashed APC lying on its side, off to Mousse's right. Crouching, the male Amazon took another shot, taking more time and care, and planted it right on the spinning barrels of the gun itself. In an instant, it became a sprinkler, spraying molten steel and ruined machinery in every direction. The motor exploded amid the secondary ammunition cook offs, filling the air with sparks.

The main gun came around, as quickly as the Hardsuit's pilot could manage. The aliens had obviously had a hand in helping build it for their thralls and allies – it was certainly powerful enough, and probably designed to bust tanks open and knock planes or even missiles out of the sky. Putting it into an anti-infantry role was a waste. Content with having taken care of the minigun, Mousse stood and took a few easy steps to the side.

"Seven, Eight, Nine…"

The ground under the Hardsuit suddenly split, forming a giant X underneath it, with lines as long as five men head to toe. Immediately, it began to list over, and then with a crash the ground beneath it gave way, the ground around it heaving out and up. Slabs of rock, like the petals of a flower, jutted upwards, sinking and trapping the Hardsuit within. Mousse never even saw the Blaster Bomb as it zipped in, took a 90 degree turn, and plunged down. He felt the explosion though, just as well as he saw it. A shockwave shook the earth and blew away smoke, ash and burning oil. A nearby truck tumbled sideways along the ground, but Mousse didn't stick around to enjoy the show. Quickly finding new cover, he took an instant to identify the location of his teammate.

"Kuno," he asked, and glanced off to the left. "You see anything over there?"

"I believe so," Kuno's voice came in clear over the dim of distant explosions and gunfire. "Yes. They are firing from one of the only partly destroyed structures. Permission to engage?"

"No," Ryouga decided, from his position elsewhere in the battlefield. "Let's scope it out first. Mousse – get over there."

"On my way!" Mousse confirmed, and started in that direction. Stealing a look at where the Hardsuit had been, he saw only a pile of rubble and stone, a bright fire burning within. The battlefield was hot as hell, and not just metaphorically. The bombardment and intense fires made thermoptics difficult to use, which left either low light or the reliable Mark 1 eyeball. Mousse stuck with the latter. His natural vision was as shitty as it had always been, but the vision correcting lenses in the face hugging goggles he wore mostly fixed that problem. More to the point: if he had a problem seeing people, he could just counter that deficit by making it harder for others to see him.

Case in point:

"Tangos sighted," he said, softly, and shouldered his weapon before taking a shot. The HUD didn't identify any of the shapes as friendly (or integrated into the overall network), so they were fair game. Mousse's plasma rifle barked, and one of the shapes vanished in a puff of bloody smoke. Flash vaporization wasn't pretty, but at least it was quick.

Ducking a little lower, Mousse took a second shot, and then a third. Another of the figures all but disintegrated. Another opened fire with a machine gun, hosing down the area. Mousse ignored it; the 7.62mm rounds simply weren't a danger to someone in personal armor. Two other shapes, however, opened fire with entirely different weapons. Resisting the impulse to go prone, trading protection and cover for mobility, he noted the faint green trails of light that shot out from the enemy position. They had some watered down alien plasma weapons, too. Mousse had seen a few on corpses earlier: they were basically scaled up plasma pistols. Still Elerium based, though, which meant the aliens could always just cut off the supply of ammunition when the partnership was no longer convenient.

Were he in powered armor, he'd be less worried about a hit. However…

Feet skidding in the dirt and dust, Mousse zipped back behind cover. A few seconds later, long range sniper fire from behind the XCOM advancing perimeter silenced the North Korean commandos. Running, now, over to Kuno's position, Mousse saw the half destroyed bunker that had been mentioned earlier. A missile erupted from part of the structure, slamming into another ruined building nearby. A HWP behind cover returned fire, laser cannon spitting nearly invisible beams of light that burned and displaced smoke in the acrid air. Kuno was crouched behind the cover of one of the destroyed buildings, his sword still at his hip, and a plasma rifle in his hands.

"Kuno," Mousse called in quick greeting as he approached.

"Mousse," the swordsman replied, and gestured towards the entrenched enemies.

"Psionic attack in ten seconds," Ryouga informed them. "Ryu and I will support from the… wait, is it east? Nobody… Eats… Sour… Watermelons… ok: west."

Mousse and Kuno just shook their heads.

There was little time to lament their leader's less than perfect directional skills, however. In moments, a loud scream came from across the battlefield, along with the sound of gun and plasma fire. One of the enemy soldiers ran right out from behind cover, arms flailing in panic. A second later, an RPG detonated behind the defilade. That was the cue; intense fire came in from the west, while the armored HWP rolled out of cover towards the enemy position. Mousse and Kuno quickly followed, using the vehicle for cover.

The panicked commando disappeared in a flash; whatever all too earthly armor he wore totally insufficient against XCOM issue alien weaponry. Another took a laser beam to the torso, and silently fell forward into a pool of concrete rubble. Another sniper shot from half the battlefield away picked off one of the soldiers as he popped out of cover to try and fire another RPG or anti tank missile. Approaching the position, Kuno quickly sighted another as he tried to shoot from around a corner. A plasma bolt incinerated the corner he had been hiding behind, and sent him howling to the ground, half his body gone.

The inside of the bunker was almost unrecognizable as such. Metal supports jutted out of the concrete like ragged black teeth, and everything inside had either been flattened by rubble or scorched by plasma fire. Glassy pools and chunks of gooey concrete covered parts of the floor, mixing and hissing on contact with pools of blood. Mousse and Kuno quickly swept what was left of the area.

"Area's clean," Mousse finally confirmed, though 'clean' wasn't the first adjective that came to mind.

"Juliet is assembling for our next big push," Ryouga informed them, his voice a little hasty. "Rendezvous with us. They'll want our support. Bring the HWP."

"Let us depart, then," Kuno spoke up, taking one last look around. "To see what further abominations these curs have debased themselves in."

"Oh, I'm sure it'll be more than enough to get the old righteous anger flowing, Kuno…"

"You have a vexing lack of appreciation for the dramatic, Mu Tzu."

Mousse laughed. "I wouldn't say that…"

* * *


	82. The Big Show II

Ranma rolled his eyes at the man's attempt to extradite himself. He'd hoped for some interesting Tae Kwon Do or other fighting prowess on the part of the special 'engineering' deputy Commander and his personal cadre of guards. After all, they were the ones who Command suspected of being most closely tied to the aliens. Even if they hadn't been a challenge for a member of Juliet Squad, Ranma had at least expected them to be interesting.

As it was, he stood calmly, pinning the deputy commander to the floor with one foot, his hands free to hold and rest on his rifle. Twelve men lay scattered around the office – draped over desks and tables, one folded over on top of a computer monitor, another dangling from the ceiling, arms swaying back and forth from the breeze of a nearby fan. Just as many weapons, handguns, submachine guns, and assault rifles, lay scattered around the room.

"Not much to them," Ranma observed, watching Konatsu as the ninja boy carefully cleaned his poisonous short sword, Habu. "But it was nice to see your 'Flying Killer Sword' again. I can see the trick you used to beat Ukyou, now."

"You saw it, eh?" Konatsu asked, though it was purely rhetorical. Looking down at the dark blade, and past its gleaming surface, to the man pinned under Ranma's foot, Konatsu smiled just a little behind his helmet's visor.

"As to be expected from you, Saotome-taichou," he concluded, apparently not concerned that one of his ninja tricks had been uncovered. "Remarkable insight, as always."

"What I don't get is why you bothered using it at all," Ranma replied.

"If you would like to know…" Konatsu held out the sword, balanced in his hand with practiced and deadly ease. "I do not use the proper version of that technique, and someone skilled in my Art would probably not call my sword 'Habu.' This is because I do not use a painful poison… instead, my Habu allows an enemy to drift off to a peaceful and endless slumber from which there is no return. It is never my desire to cause another human being undue pain, Saotome-taichou."

Ranma glanced off to the side, at one of the still bodies.

"I see."

"Hardsuit!!" Ukyou's voice interrupted, coming over the intercom. "What the Hell is it doing in here?!"

"Konatsu!" Ranma slipped the tip of his boot under the captured deputy Commander and effortlessly flicked him into the air. And into Konatsu's arms, just as the ninja sheathed his blade. A half second later, Ranma was gone.

'So fast…' the ninja marveled, not for the first time. 'Fast enough to discern the secret of my Flying Sword, despite only actually seeing it twice… Almost certainly, he had an idea of how to counter it, as well. Saotome-taichou… very impressive.'

"Please don't struggle," Konatsu said, switching to Korean and putting aside his thoughts. The man in his arms already had his hands tied behind his back, but it hadn't totally diminished his stubbornness. He was a fairly large man, just a little short of six feet tall, but the much smaller and less imposing Konatsu nonetheless handled him like one would a child.

"What did you say?" the man growled back, surprised that someone actually spoke a language he could recognize. Of course, before this the two soldiers had not activated external acoustics, leaving the only marginally bruised deputy Commander in total silence.

"I would suggest you do not struggle," Konatsu explained cheerfully. "Or I will have to paralyze you from the neck down."

The man's body instantly stiffened in fear.

"...Thank you very much for your cooperation."

* * *

Ranma sped through the hall, even as he called for psionic backup on Ukyou and Shampoo's position. It was a relief to be able to call down a BVR (beyond visual range) strike, in the form of a Blaster Bomb or a psionic attack, basically at will. Captain Ben-Solomon performed much of the work himself from the initial landing zones, supported by Alpha Squad under Sergeant Hanley, two of whom were cleared for psionic and supporting-fire warfare. Other psi-capable soldiers could be picked up from the other squads as necessary. Against human opponents, the effects were devastating. Mind Control and panic attacks scattered the ablest and most hardened of enemy squads, driving them to attack each other in fear and confusion. From there, XCOM moved in and finished the job with grim and ruthless efficiency.

Compared to fighting the aliens, it was child's play.

He stopped at an intersection, spun and jabbed to his left, blowing the door open. He then took a quick right. They were in one of the undamaged complexes, the one designed to house the experiments and research done at the human half of the facility. Post battle, Command would want hacks on everything done here, so it wasn't completely leveled during the initial bombardment. He and Konatsu had cleared out much of the east wing, while Shampoo and Ukyou had been tasked to deal with the depot, which then led to the labs. India Squad, meanwhile, hit the below ground sections, while Delta secured the area and advanced to an area Intel called "the pens." Charlie and Beta, meanwhile, were clearing out the last two bunkers and numerous defense stations.

The sizzle and explosion of a plasma grenade came from up ahead, as he entered the depot area. He instantly saw Ukyou and Shampoo, both behind rapidly disintegrating cover. The depot was a cavernous part of the facility, hewn out of mountainous rock, with scaffolding and walkways all along the walls. More than a few commandos were also present, firing from high vantage points. A massive inferno raged in the back, where a fuel line had gotten caught in the crossfire, and the overhead sprinklers were operating at full force to little or no effect. Standing, imposing, directly ahead was another North Korean Hardsuit. Two more were off line nearby, standing mute and inactive in alcoves cut into the wall. The Hardsuit took a step forward and turned slightly to face the new arrival, a soaking wet banner with the smiling face of Kim Jong-il fluttering off to its side with the force of the depot's fire suppression system.

Ranma just took a step to the right.

The Hardsuit's minigun, still spinning but not firing, turned to take aim at him even as a parallel mounted grenade launcher on the same arm opened fire. Wind contorted and wrapped around Ranma's arms, and slashing them wide, the two grenades deflected in midair. A plasma bolt splashed against the Hardsuit, now that it was distracted elsewhere, ruining the main cannon and blowing its barrel assembly into a skeletal ruin. A second later, something small, fast and silver shot by Ranma's side, coming from the open depot door.

It zipped up and around the behemoth, before plowing into its rear with force enough to bend nearby scaffolding and send men flying through the air to crash into walls and even the ceiling. Ranma shielded his face from the explosion, glad that the Commander had seen fit to direct the Blaster Bomb up and around, instead of right into, the target. He wasn't very keen on getting caught in anything like that any time soon. If he wanted to take a dip in the sun, he'd go to Okinawa and try and get a tan.

Without prompting, Ukyou and Shampoo emerged from cover, and opened fire on the few remaining commandos who had been further back in the depot. Ranma reached down and lifted his own weapon, taking aim as he advanced. Taking a last shot (a miss; it had to fall to Shampoo to pick the man off from his prone position on the railing), Ranma ejected the plasma carbine's spent cartridge, and reloaded.

"Looks clear," he said, speaking to Command as his eyes went from one side of the depot to the other. "How you holding up, India?"

Without prompting, he patched into the Squad Leader comm. frequency.

"Not bad," Ryouga responded, after a second's delay. "Kuno found a nest of abductees."

"D-type?"

"One E, three D. A bunch of C. All volunteers."

Ranma nodded grimly. "Dead?"

"Do you have to ask?"

Well, some things changed less than others.

"You done?"

"We should be soon. Ryu and Mousse are securing the area. Hold on…" Ryouga's voice cut off as he switched back to his team comm.

"Rachael," Ranma asked, as he watched Ukyou and Shampoo moving forwards to check a small office near the back of the depot. "Patch me into India, would you?"

A second or two later and he was in.

"…suspicious. Looks locked, though. We'll have to blast through." That was Ryu's voice.

"Something interesting?" Ranma asked.

"I think so," Ryouga answered, not sounding annoyed that Ranma had butted in. "We've got a door here, a heavy one. Like the kind you'd see on a bank vault. No idea what's inside. We're translating some of the stuff nearby now."

"Keep me appraised, would ya?"

"Will do."

"Saotome-taichou," Konatsu interrupted. "I have handed over the deputy Commander to Squaddie Byrne, in Alpha Squad. Returning now."

Ranma nodded to himself. "Good work, Konatsu. Anything over there, Shampoo?"

"No enemies," she replied, from the end of the depot. "No Tangos, I mean. But there's a fire in this trash can. I think they burned their files."

"Computers?"

"Two of them. Intact, but powered down."

"The tech heads will want to pick the hard drives anyway. Case 'em, and let's head back."

"Yes, sir."

Ranma sighed, and tilted his head to stare up at the still active sprinklers. Cool water ran in rivulets down his helmet and personal armor. Had he been without it, his Jyusenkyou curse would have activated, leaving him to fight (once again) as a girl. Oddly, the more he got used to fighting again, pretty much all the time, as a man… the less horrible it became to actually have the curse. Not that he _liked_ turning into a cute busty redhead when he got splashed, but without all the inconvenient splashing like he got in Nerima… well, it was livable.

He paused at that.

'Livable?' he repeated in his mind. 'Did I actually think that?'

He tried it again, more clearly, 'I think I can live with my curse.' It only sounded halfway convincing, but the initial slip hadn't been a coincidence. It was a sobering and somewhat aggravating premise… that he could even imagine giving up on a cure, and going back to being a man all the time, hot water or cold. After all, he was a guy. He had the balls to prove it. He'd even slept with a girl, though he hadn't told anyone about _that_. Occasionally crossdressing to fight giant eight headed monsters or putting on a skirt to get free food – aside from _all that_ – he was a guy. A man among men, just like his mother wanted.

'I can live with my curse?' he shook his head, denying it.

Then, suddenly, a chill ran down his spine.

"I got it open!" Ryu yelled with a whoop of triumph audible and clear over the teamcomm. "That was the code, alright! Good work, Nabiki!"

'This feeling…' Ranma's mind raced, immediately focused on the dull rumble of his _sakkijutsu_. It was exciting and terrifying all at once, and growing in intensity.

"Ranma," Ryouga spoke up, "Get Juliet together and meet up with us. Command wants us to check this out while Mountain Boomer gets underway. They don't want to leave any potential avenues of escape."

"We'll be there shortly," Ranma replied, partly by rote.

'This feeling… it has to be…'

* * *

"Curse you, woman! What is the meaning of this interminable delay?"

Sitting at her desk, Nabiki rubbed her temples in open vexation. "I forwarded the information for analysis. It'll take just another moment or two, Kuno-baby..." She explicitly used the English rather than the more familiar Kuno-chan to doubly annoy him. He really was acting like a big baby.

"Listen here, you nettlesome fishwife, the future of the Kuno family is at stake! I will not have our line cut short but for your lack of due haste!"

"There's always Kodachi…"

"I would not trust the future of our noble line to that intemperate woman! If she would bed a half man like Saotome, then…"

"I can hear you, you know," Ranma interrupted. "And if you ask me, your genes could **use** a few new mutations, Kuno."

"You dare impugn the laurelled and studied majesty of the Kuno genome?"

"Isn't that what I just did?"

"Were you present, Lieutenant, I would _smite_ thee."

Nabiki turned her head at the sound of a chime, eyes focusing on the small dedicated communications transceiver-receiver set up to her left. It was a stand alone part of the base's internal communications network; everyone had one, allowing anyone to efficiently contact anyone else. Resembling a digital phone mounted into a light black plastic stand, it bundled both audio and video. What it _couldn't_ do was send anywhere outside the base's internal network protocol. That was handled almost entirely by hyperwave communications to second tier facilities.

It had a software compatibility with the computer as well, allowing instant sharing of data in real time with all the ease of a phone call. Which Nabiki had used to forward the unusual radiation readings Kuno had started getting as he and India Squad moved deeper into the alien base. Not surprisingly, Kuno had been more than a little alarmed by his personal armor's helpful warning that it had detected an unusual radiation source nearby and that Kuno was bathing in a fraction of its atomic glow.

The man now appearing on the screen was from Intel… but no one she knew personally.

"There is nothing to worry about, Miss Tendo. We believe your squad is close to the aliens' primary Elerium stockpile. In sufficient quantities, it can set off a suit's warning receiver, but there is no danger, even without the benefit of NBC gear," the man explained in a casual, and to Nabiki, somewhat haughty tone of voice. "Command would like any stockpiled Elerium secured. Immediately. This has priority over all existing missions."

Nabiki nodded. "Yes, sir. I'll pass that on."

"See that you do," he curtly replied, and cut off without further ado.

"Nice guy…" Nabiki grumbled, but turned back to the screen. "Ok, guys. Intel says there's Elerium in those hills, and they want it. Top priority."

"What of the Kuno family jewels, woman?! Are they safe?"

"Why don't you check them for yourself and see if they're ok?" Then, guessing he would actually contemplate that, she amended it by adding, "Kuno-baby, the radiation is harmless. There isn't even enough to shrivel a fruit fly's balls."

"Then the legendary Kuno virility is unmarred! Tis a relief…"

"Does the mission have priority?" Ryouga spoke up, as usual not one to mince many words while in action.

"It does," she confirmed.

"Looks like we're going to have to part ways, Saotome," India Squad's lieutenant announced. "India Squad! Let's move out! Ryu – take point."

"Happy to!"

"Kuno, you're behind him. Watch for an ambush."

"Yes, sir."

Nabiki watched through the four cameras on her main screen. Her role was important, but limited. All she could do was try and keep an eye on what their individual sensors recorded, and compare that to the information assembled by the rest of the assault squads. She had a growing map of the complex on another screen, compiled in real time by leading assault elements. Several spots were flashing red, indicating contact with the enemy. A running tally of enemies encountered was also ongoing, since the aliens tended to fight in groups of the same type: Sectoids in one area, Snakemen in another, Ethereals waiting in the shadows and letting the humans exhaust themselves killing Sectoids and Snakemen…

Unfortunately, Juliet and India Squads had taken a backdoor into the alien complex. Alpine Echo Seven was large, too, but proximate tracking and GPS had at least determined where the two squads were relative to the main force. Nabiki couldn't be sure, but if the Elerium stockpile was nearby, it was likely that one or both squads were heading towards the alien's garage. While underground, they were skirting the edges of the lake, and she had been informed that the aliens used it as a cover for launching and recovery, so it made sense.

Then, without warning, the corridor that Juliet Squad had been advancing down flashed red.

"Be careful," she said, leaning a little closer to the screen. "Juliet is encountering the enemy."

She saw one of the camera's shift, as Ryu looked abruptly to his right. She saw his hand shoot up, indicating that they should hold back. Up ahead, a T junction hung in the darkness. The aliens rarely used lighting of any sort, which left XCOM to fight in the dark. Nabiki glanced down at one of the displays on Ryu's HUD: his motion sensor.

"They're at the end of the hall," Ryu hissed.

"Do it," Ryouga growled.

Nabiki saw Ryu pull back one arm, and slash with the other. Then the screen became a blur as he twirled, and she could guess that he was using his feet to create additional vacuum blades. It meant he didn't have to cycle between the attack and his rifle. In less than a second, the others were moving, and she couldn't tell what was going on.

"Tango!"

"Sectoids!"

"Got im!"

"He's down!"

She heard weapons fire – plasma weapons barking in the dark, coughing flashes of light that burned like the sun against the personal armor's infrared sensors. Luckily the sensors were shielded and had an upper limit, or the weapons fire alone would have been blinding. Everyone moved too fast to really follow, except occasionally when they hit cover and fired.

India Squad was storming the junction.

She saw Mousse's camera as he fired at a small grey shape that had taken refuge behind a corner of the wall. A flash erupted behind it. On Ryouga's screen, a ball of light burned overhead – it seemed so close that it had to have hit, at least to her. But no one screamed or fell to the ground, camera shaking or off line as plasma melted it to slag. Their suits reported perfect health, no breaches, no problems.

"Die, you son of a…!"

"Tango down!"

"Grenade!"

"Got it!"

"Move! Move!"

More weapons fire; more blurs on the screen. Maybe, if they had been anything near normal, then she could have followed it. But India Squad didn't just storm a corner, they used one of those weird martial arts techniques to blast across the space. All the screen showed was a blur, or sometimes a visible skip in the framerate. It was encouraging in a way, but frustrating, too. If something did happen to any of them, she had a feeling – no: she _knew_ that she probably wouldn't even see it coming. It was scary, but she probably wouldn't be able to tell if one of these fights were going well or down the crapper.

"Clear."

"Clear."

"Mousse," Ryouga spoke more slowly, and Nabiki could see that he was standing and not moving… or firing. He still had his carbine at the ready, though. "Status? What do you see?"

"More walls. They go on straight ahead. Nothing unusual."

"Same here," the normally lost boy admitted. "Nabiki?"

"Yep?" she asked, always listening and waiting.

"Any difference in… what's it called? Greiger counter...?"

"Geiger," Mousse supplied.

"Any difference in radiation between Mousse and Kuno and me and Ryu?"

Nabiki checked. "Nothing substantial. Mousse's count is a little lower than everyone else's, but Kuno's is the same."

"I **am** surrounded by something like five hundred pounds of assorted toys," Mousse said, and she could almost hear his smile.

"We're going to have to split up. Mousse. Kuno. Watch yourselves. If you hit another junction, stay put and hold it. Wait for us to clear our section."

"Sir."

"Yes, sir."

"Ryu!"

"Sir!"

Glancing back at the real time map, she saw that Juliet squad had also hit an intersection. In their case, they were securing it while two members – it looked like Konatsu and Ukyou – cleared the eastern corridor. Both lieutenants were playing it cautious and conservative, at least by their standards. Still… Nabiki had a bad feeling about what was ahead. They'd both encountered small groups of Sectoids, but there hadn't been any mental attacks, which were otherwise rampant among the main assault force.

The aliens _knew_ where they were, at least in a general sense.

It was definitely possible that the two squads had hit the aliens by surprise, and they didn't have enough rear guards in the area to mount an effective counterattack. But that was probably the most optimistic scenario. At worst, they were walking into a trap, or the aliens were setting up a Blaster Bomb route…

* * *

Ukyou and Konatsu advanced through the alien doors as they melded into the walls. Like a lot of amazing technology, they took it for normal by this point. Which was not to say they were immune to awe. Through the doors, Konatsu and Ukyou stood, mute, before what they saw.

It was the 'garage.'

Spread out before and below them was a cavern, large enough to boggle the mind. Unlit, it seemed to stretch on forever. The walls were smooth and high, so much so that the ground couldn't be clearly seen. The sight of a landed alien battleship gave the garage some perspective: the ceiling was perhaps twice again the height of the alien ship, maybe a little more, placing it at about 35 or 36 meters. Berthed beside the battleship sat a large scout, and another large scout, and another. And another. And then, in the distance, two Abductor class vessels.

It was, perhaps, a kilometer or more long.

"Saotome-taichou…" Konatsu recovered first, and spoke up to inform their squad leader. "We have found the alien hangar facilities. They seem to be empty."

"Good work, Konatsu. Ukyou. Secure the area."

Before Konatsu or Ukyou could reply, however, they felt a chill run down their spines. Neither master martial artist saw anything unusual or suspicious, but something deep down in the self-preservation center of the brain _compelled_ them to turn and look behind them. Konatsu and Ukyou responded to the call, and an anxious glance quickly turned into a long look of shock.

Standing less than a meter behind them, within arm's reach even, stood a man in titian robes. The hood of his monastic cowl was drawn back, exposing his face to the half light from one of the flares dropped in the hallway outside. There was light enough to see that his human features were tortured: the eyes were gone, leaving blackened hollows like a mockery of glasses, the hair was gone and the lips were slightly pulled back, creating a permanent scowl that exposed teeth.

"Hello there," it said, in Japanese, with a well mannered tone. "How are you two doing today?"

* * *

'That feeling… him…!'

Ranma's _sakkijutsu_ recognized Doctor Tofu, even now. The doctor had fooled it before, a long time ago, even to the point where he could sneak up on Ranma while he was fully alert. For someone who could rely on his danger sense to dodge an attack even while asleep, that was no small feat. But Ranma had gotten better over the last two years. A lot better! He felt it, barely, and knew what it meant.

He turned slightly, on the verge of launching himself to the aid of his companions.

"I wouldn't," a voice suggested. It wasn't one he recognized, at least not immediately.

Turning his head, slowly, he saw a woman standing next to Shampoo. She didn't seem overly interested or concerned with the girl, who still crouched, weapon held against her shoulder and ready to fire at anything peeking out from down the west hall. It took Shampoo a moment to process that someone was standing next to her. She turned her head, but saw only the stranger's – the woman's – back. Her hair was long and dark, cascading down and contrasting sharply with the vivid Ethereals' habit that she wore.

"Ranma," she said, with a smile. Then, as if an afterthought, she glanced over her shoulder. "Great grand-daughter."

* * *


	83. The Big Show III

--

"Cologne…" Ranma whispered, body still tensed to dash to the aid of Ukyou and Konatsu. It was impossible now. He could tell that she was reading his _kizashi_, and that any movement he made would be met and countered. He'd fought with Cologne before… though a more appropriate analysis was that she had toyed with him before… but it had never felt like this. It wasn't fear; it was _insecurity_. And that was the far more despicable and insidious of the two, at least to the heir of Anything Goes.

He relaxed his body, and he could see and feel that she did the same.

"How are you, Ranma?" Cologne asked, holding out her weaponless hands in a show of good faith. "You probably didn't cure yourself when you figured out the side effects, but you look healthy. Have you enjoyed the last few months?"

"I like to think I've done some good for the world," Ranma answered, mind racing for options. A mental attack would be optimal, but if Cologne shook it off, or if the psionic attacker couldn't locate her, then the fight would be on and he'd lose the first strike advantage. A Blaster Bomb would be handy, too, but there was no way to get it into the room with all the closed doors behind them.

"Some good?" Cologne asked, and subsequently shrugged. "I can see why you'd think that. But you're missing the bigger picture. What good is it to save a few lives if you doom humanity as a whole? Don't hate these visitors just because of what they've done to a few people… we're their children, Ranma. They love us. They want to protect and guide us, and take us with them to the stars. Not as slaves. As equals! They want us to be their equals and partners."

Ranma frowned. Still, something about what she said… it made some sense…

"I don't want to fight you, Ranma. …_Don't you trust me_?" She took a step towards him and held out her hand. It looked delicate and frail, a woman's hand, but he knew it held untold power.

He wanted to take it.

"I… I did trust you…"

"_Trust me again, Ranma_," she insisted, dulcet tones filling his thoughts like a siren's song. "Come with me, and I'll teach you things you never imagined. I know the potential you have, and I weep to see it wasted on those who can never truly appreciate you. _Come with me_. I'll show you how to unlock your full potential... And then you can show me the perfected form of Anything Goes Martial Arts. Let's get there together, Ranma."

Ranma's mind began to swim, his vision growing hazy.

"**Take my hand**."

For a moment, he stood, staring at her. Then his rifle fell from his fingertips, hitting the ground with a distant and muted clang. He ignored it, ignored it all, and reached for her. Cologne was right. She could appreciate him, and his love of the Art. He did trust her. Despite the occasional rocks and shoals in their relationship, she always seemed to mean for the best. Maybe she was right about the aliens. Maybe…

"Ranma!"

Suddenly, Cologne disappeared in a flash of movement. The hand was gone. In its place, he felt something... no: someone, shaking him. His head began to clear, and he saw Shampoo. She stood in front of him, her rifle at her shoulder, between him and an outline in brushed bronze. He shook his head, and the spell seemed to dissipate.

"Saotome," the voice was Rachael's, speaking for Command. "Sir, are you all right?"

"What the Hell was that…?"

"Che!" Cologne snapped, taking a step forward from out of the shadows. "You see that, great granddaughter? That was how you were _supposed_ to have done it. But you never did have any skill with verbal techniques."

"Shampoo," Ranma began to ask.

"That was one of the 'women and men' fighting arts we warned you about," she explained, obviously trying to do so as quickly as possible. "It uses woman's voice to fool man. Trick him."

"Will it work on you?"

"No. That technique should only work on man. I have never heard of an Amazon using it on a woman."

'Maybe I should have splashed myself before I came here, then,' Ranma thought, a little bitterly. But then he'd known beforehand that Cologne had techniques specially designed to fight men. His stubbornness and pride would have made it difficult to justify trying to fight Cologne as a girl.

"Shampoo," Cologne spoke, still using Japanese and not bothering to properly pronounce the other Amazon's name. "You don't interest me anymore. Get out of the way."

The words were cold, heartless, so diametrically opposed to the kind and loving tone that the woman had directed to Ranma; so unlike the firm but loving voice of her great grandmother. They cut Shampoo to the bone, and her heart clenched in grief and anger.

"Why…" she switched to external speakers. "Why did you betray the village? What happened to you?"

Cologne's neck craned upwards as she appraised Shampoo with all the contempt one would have for a slug or snail caught in the garden.

"Our Tribe? The 'Woman Hero Tribe,' the 'Amazon Village' … what do these attachments matter to me? I have had my eyes opened to the truth. I have seen back through a hundred thousand years of patient husbandry! From my perspective, our village has all the cosmic significance of an ant carrying a grain of sand on the beach."

"Then why not just leave them alone?" Shampoo's voice hardened. "Why?"

"Convenience," Cologne replied. "There were a few girls I wanted to check in on, and some loose ends to tie up. It was also a fitting test for those few I wanted to bring with me. Don't you understand? From the moment they had me, the rest of the village became irrelevant. There is nothing you or your sisters could contribute to the future that is not already within me."

Shampoo's grip on her weapon tightened.

"Are you going to fight me, girl?" Cologne asked, and her lips curled into a smirk. "Do you honestly think you have a chance of winning? You're a failure, Shan Pu, and you know it. Your mother… your grandmother… they had some potential, but you…? I have trained four generations of geniuses, and your abilities are sorely lacking. A _boy child _could have filled my heart with more pride."

Shampoo was, by this point, as still as a statue.

"Ohh?" Cologne tilted her head. "Are you going to cry?"

But she stood, silent.

"Shampoo," Ranma started to say.

"I know," she replied, voice subdued. Slightly lowering her weapon, Shampoo took a step back. "Be careful, Lieutenant."

He nodded. "I will."

Cologne blinked; surprised.

"I'm going to help my friends," Shampoo said, and with that, she turned her back and headed towards Ukyou and Konatsu.

For a moment, just a moment, Cologne's expression turned contemplative, but then it was gone. She and Ranma both waited, standing, until Shampoo was out of earshot.

"I'm sorry you had to hear that, Ranma, but she had no business getting involved..."

"Shut up!" he barked, not caring just how pissed off he sounded. He didn't like to fight angry, but right now he couldn't remember the last time he'd been so filled with rage. Cologne's dainty eyebrows rose slightly at the force of his words.

"You're angry I mistreated your friend," she calmly observed. "Deep down, you always were too kind, Ranma. I just hope that the last few weeks have taught you the importance of bloodshed."

"I'm gonna destroy you." He locked his rifle securely behind his back. There was no way he'd hit Cologne with it under these conditions.

"I'm sorry you feel that way," the ostensibly older woman let her hands fall to her sides. "I suppose… it's a fight, then."

* * *

The crackle of flares bathed the alien hangar complex in a soft red hue.

"Where is he?" Ukyou hissed, standing almost back to back with Konatsu as they frantically searched around them. They were on the floor of the garage, now, having been all but ejected from the upper railing when she had tried to attack their new opponent. Unlike the hangar back at Seiran, the aliens kept theirs almost bare of any equipment or other functional objects. Only the landed UFOs sat in their berths, like buildings within a building.

"Children," the voice came, and the two spun to see a dark shape perched on top of the alien battleship nearby.

"I'll ask you again," it said. "And for the last time. Don't make me fight you."

A blast of plasma was their reply.

"Very well," the voice continued, this time from behind them. "If you insist on being stubborn..."

Then the voice was gone, trailing off and leaving the threat unspoken. Ukyou searched with her eyes, with her ears, and with her _sakkijutsu_. All came back negative. It wasn't even like they were getting false positives, and jumping at ghosts. There was nothing to see, nothing to feel. It was like the man had no _ki_ at all, except that even a non-living threat could set off the near precognition of _sakkijutsu_. However their senses were being fooled, it was well beyond what Ukyou knew of the highest levels of the Art.

Only their motion sensors were of some help.

Ukyou tried to keep an eye on the display, but even glancing at it made her feel vulnerable. Their enemy wasn't just practically invisible and un-sensible, but fast to boot. She saw the sensor register a contact, briefly, and then it was gone. He had to be moving in short bursts – she assumed – which meant a form of speed movement. Her eyes moved from his previous position to his last one. It was maybe forty meters, but he hadn't gone through her or Konatsu, which meant he'd probably used two jumps in quick succession. So: two speed steps of about 30 meters. That wasn't _too_ insane or out of their league.

Just _slightly_ insane and _slightly_ out of their league.

"Is there something interesting over there…?"

Her eyes darted to her left, where she saw the man just behind her. Pupils growing small, she reacted on impulse, and tried to displace her target with an instinctive elbow strike. It was a mistake. She saw, but couldn't move her body fast enough to stop, him as he reached into her guard and let her strike flow like water down his forearm. It was so smooth and gentle, not like the hard and fierce blocks and counters she was used to. Before she knew it, her elbow was up in the air, vertical to her body, and exposing her arm pit.

The man's other hand flattened, and she could guess he meant to strike her there, in one of the body's principal soft spots.

'One move… he's beaten me in one move? No!'

"No!" She fired, almost without thinking, and as the blast hit the ground at their feet, she started to fall back. His chance for a clean strike lost, the man instead shifted instantly to a different means of attack. His arms and hands moved in a practiced blur, and in an instant he had her by her arm. Ukyou found herself staring at the barrel of a plasma carbine.

"I wouldn't fire if I were you," their assailant suggested, painfully holding her between himself and the genius ninja. Konatsu didn't lower his weapon, and she could guess that he was looking for some way to shoot around her. For her part, Ukyou could tell she was pretty well immobilized. She still held her plasma rifle in one hand, but it had been seized at the wrist.

And then her hand opened and her weapon fell to the ground. She knew there was a pressure point there that could do that, but not that it could be used through the personal armor they wore. She hadn't even felt pressure being applied to it! Rapidly considering a more drastic means of escape, or at least putting her opponent off balance, the last thing she expected was to be set free. He let go of her hand, and she twisted forward even as his hand brushed up and past her neck.

Before she had even recovered, Konatsu opened fire. Ukyou could see that it had missed, and that it was now his turn to try and grapple with the stranger. Except it was no stranger. She had been briefed on who is was… who it had to be. Who it had to have _once_ been. Doctor Tofu… except no one had ever fought the doctor before. No one knew what he was capable of; except that he could somehow mask his aura and that he had an extensive knowledge of pressure points.

Reaching behind her back, she retrieved her battle spatula.

Konatsu was fast and skilled, she knew that first hand, but the doctor was easily keeping pace bare-handed. And Ukyou could tell that Konatsu wasn't holding back even a fraction. Blades popped out of the ninja's forearms as he slashed and spun. Four, then six, long lines of sparks slashed a purple tinted cylinder of alien metal. The doctor parried the blows without apparent effort, weaving deftly inside Konatsu's guard, and striking.

And hitting only thin air as Konatsu vanished in a fading afterimage.

She'd encountered that before, having fought Konatsu, but this time the body replacement forming the foundation of the _ninjutsu_ illusion was unusually small. A single plasma grenade hung suspended in midair, a few bits of straw wrapped around it in a rough approximate of the human form. Had he tried that move on her, Ukyou's training would have instantly dictated that she hide behind the flat of her blade. That was, if sheer shock hadn't stunned her into hesitating and making a deadly mistake.

'There's no time to dodge! Konatsu did it!' she almost lowered her guard.

Then Doctor Tofu plucked the plasma grenade out of the air and held it calmly in his palm.

"Hm," he mused, examining it. "That was pretty dangerous."

Casually tossing the grenade onto the ground he let it roll away and into a corner.

'A dud? No. That can't be! Did he…' she could scarcely imagine it. 'Did he disarm it? That's impossible! They said it was tamper proof, even with telekinetics!'

A moment later, a thunderous explosion rocked the hangar.

Tofu ignored the sound and fury and instead looked up. Konatsu wasn't even announcing his techniques anymore. The air filled with bladed paper as the male kunoichi unleashed his _Füjin Seikyü Senpu_ (Heartless Bill Whirlwind). From another angle, another Konatsu launched a volley of shuriken, and from another, a barrage of needles. It was a combination attack from every angle. There was no where to quick step to, no matter what the manner of Tofu's speed technique was. Unless he could teleport, anyway, which Ukyou dearly hoped he couldn't.

Tofu didn't and couldn't.

He spun as the attacks rained down, gliding through the hailstorm. Those attacks he couldn't dodge, he picked from the air or knocked aside. All around him, shuriken and needles clattered to the ground, bouncing and skidding against the impenetrable surface. It wasn't just an amazing display of agility, but perception as well. Konatsu's doubles had varied what they threw, adding a few needles in with the shuriken and some shuriken in with the needles. Almost certainly, all had been poisoned beforehand as well, just like Konatsu's sword.

Which left only the comparatively harmless "bill whirlwind."

Ukyou began to build up her _ki_ to jump in when Konatsu landed nearby.

"Now!" he yelled, and the flurry of papers around Tofu constricted, sticking to him rather than trying to cut through his Ethereal's cloak.

For a half second, standing amid a pool of deflected or avoided weaponry, Tofu stopped and looked down at the papers on his arms, legs and torso.

And then he exploded.

"Konatsu Andon!"  
(Konatsu Paper Lantern)

Amid the flames, Tofu stumbled, trying to pat the fires out.

"You can't put them out," Konatsu informed his victim, and holding out his hand Ukyou could see a small remote. A remote detonator!

"You've heard of napalm, I assume. I treated many of my paper shuriken with either an incendiary agent and or a small amount of plastic explosive…" he dropped the remote. "This fight is over. Those flames will burn you down to your bones."

"Amazing, Konatsu!" Ukyou let her _ki_ dissipate, as she clasped her team mate's shoulder in congratulations. She was inwardly more than a little peeved that she hadn't been able to help, but that did nothing to detract from her friend's accomplishment. Konatsu hadn't just improved on his techniques; he'd adapted them to become far deadlier.

He really was a genius!

"Miss Ukyou, thank you…"

Still burning, Tofu fell to his knees. Ukyou couldn't help but feel bad for him; it was a terrible end for such a kind man. But she focused her anger at the aliens. They had done this to him. Not Konatsu.

"Ahhh… Well! That really was impressive! Praiseworthy, even... You actually _killed_ Betty."

Standing atop one of the parked large scouts, Konatsu's double let out a strangled cry. On top of another UFO, another of the doubles contorted and fell, gracelessly, off the edge of the ship and to the floor. Standing where the last one had been was a familiar form. Ukyou quickly looked back to the burning corpse…

Betty?

"Betty," Tofu repeated. "My assistant."

Ukyou did vaguely remember. Doctor Tofu had jokingly called the skeleton in his office "Betty" before, when she had visited there with Ran-chan (er: Lieutenant Saotome). But whatever Konatsu had destroyed… it had looked like Tofu, albeit in his Trenchard state. What was going on?

"You seem surprised by something," Tofu casually observed. "You see, I don't like fighting. I prefer to let Betty, or one of my other assistants, do it for me."

"No," he interrupted, before they could ask. "I don't mean a clone. It would be cruel to use a clone of me in that way."

Ukyou could see the corpse, even through the fire. Its face was mostly intact. It looked human. Or human-ish.

Then it came to her.

She switched to her armor's external speakers. "You were manipulating someone's body…"

"It was no one you knew," he explained, as if such a statement was actually reassuring. "I just recycled one of the women we picked up in the Amazon village."

Ukyou felt a sharp spike of anger rise up inside. This was…

"Disgusting…"

"You think so? It was completely painless…" His expression didn't waver. It was as if he had been standing and watching the whole time. "Once unconscious, I simply necrotized the parts of her mind relating to memory and personality. I'd be hesitant to even call it a she. Betty was just a skeleton with some meat on her… so don't feel bad about breaking her. Really."

The dark holes where his eyes had been caught a hint of red light.

"Making another only takes a few minutes."

For a handful of seconds, the two younger martial artists just started at him.

"Such fierce expressions! I suppose I'm fortunate this isn't a popularity contest…" The robed figure chuckled in apparently genuine amusement. "Isn't that right, Shampoo?"

The Amazon landed nearby from where she had been hiding, watching, and listening. Ukyou could guess that she had probably also thought that Konatsu had won the fight, and as such, hadn't intervened.

"Monster!" Shampoo spat.

"You worked for me before, Shampoo," he noted. "I even wrote you a fairly glowing work reference when you left. I… seem... to be looking for a new assistant at the moment. I don't suppose I could tempt you?"

Shampoo, still holding her rifle, lifted it to her shoulder.

"I see. Three on one is a little messy, so…" Tofu turned his head to face a different direction. "Assistant Number Two?"

Without further warning, the doors of one of the large scouts opened, and another cloaked figure stepped out. Against the light of a nearby flare, Ukyou could clearly see her face. The girl seemed perfectly normal, pretty even, but she wasn't anyone Ukyou knew or recognized.

"This is Rouge," Tofu introduced the new arrival. "Let me apologize in advance for her temper, but she'll be helping me kill you."

* * *


	84. The Big Show IV

Ranma grimaced as he landed, arm throbbing with pain, the heel of his boot just touching the wall behind him. He had used it to keep from crashing into the wall of tiered alien metal, but the force transmitted into the structure was still telling. Tiny purple leaves drifted through the air, loosened by the indirect force of the blow he'd received. Their fight had taken him down the hall and into what could only be one of the alien garden complexes. Intel had briefed him on these areas, and that they were often infested with Chryssalids.

At the moment, fighting a Chryssalid would have been a relief.

Cologne stood in the center of a large oval clearing, strange alien plants rising around her and up towards the ceiling, twenty meters above. Her stance was practiced and casual, with one arm up, and palm up, and one arm down, and palm down. She appeared untouched, unharmed, and in contrast to the slashes and damage his armor had on display. Worse than that, he could tell that her blows were primarily internal, and not external, using soft martial arts and explosive bursts of power. Even using the more heavily protected sections of his personal armor as a crutch she'd still been able to hurt him.

Pushing off of the wall, he assumed his own stance, fists clenched. Direct confrontation wasn't working. Not only was Cologne just as fast as he'd expected, as he'd remembered, but her experience and style were throwing him off. Abstractly, he understood that she had fought Happosai, the founder of _Musabetsu Kakuto Ryu_, whereas the only Amazon he'd had much experience with was Mousse. There were some similarities there, but not enough to reliably exploit. Not only was she was far more familiar with his fighting style than he was with hers', but, as expected, she outclassed him in general fighting experience by decades.

Spreading his legs, Ranma concentrated his battle aura, sending it down to his calves before shooting towards his opponent in a sudden burst of speed. Cologne stepped into a circular motion, right arm rotating clockwise to field an inverted palm strike, and then anti-clockwise to redirect another blow with Ranma's left hand. There was little time to see Cologne's counterattack, or even to read it. But he could guess that it would be, and fell to his left, avoiding another open palmed thrust to the throat. He had to take advantage of his flexibility and unpredictability to attack from unusual and unexpected angles.

Stopping his fall with his left hand, and supporting his body with only that arm, he kicked out with one foot and then the other, aiming for vulnerable parts of the lower torso, and then the face. He'd hoped to drive Cologne back, but her arms spun in oblique circles as she parried the blows, and continued her spiral footwork. Cursing at his missed opportunity to land a clean hit, Ranma switched instantly to both legs and a low stance. He'd have preferred to not use Kung Fu against Cologne, but the position had left him with few other options. Striking upwards with snake, and then moving as quickly as possible into a more familiar hard style, he locked wrists with her and kicked – toes, inside of the knee, groin, kidneys, arm pit, and then into a heel strike.

Cologne shifted her footwork, spinning her body as well as her arms. Those blows that actually seemed to get through and connect became brushed aside by the movement of her body, and then she struck. The first blow was only to stun him and throw him off balance, and then she had circled around and stepped behind him. Twin strikes: to the back of the skull and the lumbar indentation of the vertebra, sent him tumbling and spinning. For the first time, he couldn't manage a proper landing on his feet and instead he hit the ground face first, his body twisting from the blows.

"Damnit…!" he hissed, instinctively tucking and rolling onto his feet and backing up. He could feel a spike of ice shooting into the back of his brain, and it hurt to move his neck. His spine seemed to have faired better, but only because of the armor there.

Regaining his senses, he saw Cologne standing, in the same stance as before.

Her style of fighting wasn't completely unknown to him. It seemed be a form of _Baguazhang_ (Eight Trigram Palm) or _Xinyi Hunyuan Taijiquan_ (Fist of Form and Mind). He recognized the _Zuo-You Shuang Shou_ movements, but it wasn't one of the styles of fighting he was intimately experienced with. Genma had never taught him that there were people who could use it at this level.

While her movements were frustrating enough, her strikes were doubly troubling. Ranma had taken any number of terrific blows over the years… the damage to Nerima Ward was proof enough of that. He'd trained to take direct damage to the body and get back up. He'd trained to keep fighting, even with normally crippling injuries to his musculoskeletal system. But Cologne's blows were different, sending shocks of twisting force into his nerves and disrupting his localized _ki_. If she kept it up, her blows would actually wear him down faster than Ryouga's…

It had to be some mutation of normal _Fa-jing_ or _Chan Si-jing_. The explosive force or "issuing power" of Cologne's blows, even when striking within a very short distance, was a result of her using her whole body to project force instead of relying on just her arms and legs. Even when she blocked or deflected an attack, there was an element of counter-force she applied…. her mastery over the release and projection of physical forces created by the body, coupled with the "silk reeling force" of her _Chan Si-jing_ (the circular and spiral forces) basically turned her entire body into a dynamo.

The strength of her style was in the point of contact, and the required moment of relaxation in her body as she redistributed the forces involved, usually down and then up, before adding the twisting force of her _Chan Si-jing_. The normal way to overcome that was to hit harder and faster than the forces could redistribute. The problem was that Cologne was already inhumanly fast herself. Another possibility was to overwhelm the body with direct blows, making it impossible to redistribute force to all the points of contact.

The _Musabetsu Kakuto Ryu_ was predicated on the analysis of an enemy's fighting style and techniques, and Ranma's mind constantly searched for weakness to exploit. Having found one, he resolved to put it to the test. Field testing was also a traditional staple of theschool of Anything Goes…

"Cologne…" he began, standing and shaking out his shoulders while he talked. "This style of Taijiquan. Is it based on Fu Style Baguazhang? The attacks seem more like Xingyiquan."

She smiled amicably as the inquiry.

"How nice of you to ask, Ranma," she replied, and he waited for her to relax a little as she lectured. "Actually, this is neither traditional Xingyiquan or Baguazhang, but an amalgamation based on local styles predating Dong Haichuan and updated several times in the intervening centuries…"

Behind his helmet, Ranma's eyes glinted with hidden malice. The _Moko Ichigeki Tai_ (Fierce Tiger Hit Figure), of the _Saotome Ryu Urawaza Hiougi_ (Saotome School Underhanded Techniques) was about to claim another victim!

Of course, the so called "secret technique" was just distracting an enemy and then hitting them, but the trick was to find out what it took to distract the opponent in the first place. Normally, a hundred yen coin would suffice (or the pretense of one, since martial artists were usually dirt poor), but in Cologne's case, a long winded lecture on obscure martial arts would work, too. She had just begun talking about the underlying Taoist philosophy of the style, when he saw the opening and took it. Her stance slightly relaxed, her mind slightly distracted – she blinked.

It was a mistake.

"Shichuu Rakuchi Sei!"  
(Brace Falling Down Strength)

"Wh…?"

Emerging from the quick step, there was no time for Ranma to execute the _Umisenken_ move like he had before. He had to keep from using anything less than one contact point at the same time. Substituting his leg for one of his arms, he drove apart and disrupted Cologne's stance, while using his elbow as the compound strike to her abdomen. It was the first clean hit he'd gotten since the fight began.

"Goshin Ryü Sei Fu!"  
(Self-Protection Falling Star Cloth)

Moving quickly, he retrieved the garroted cloth he kept stashed near his spare ammunition clips. Sliding back his left foot in a wide arc, Ranma twisted and propelled himself around Cologne's left side, and to her exposed back, all while slipping the cloth around her neck.

"Haizan Tökai Tai!"

(High Mountain Fall-to-Sea Posture)

Technically, it was an inverted version of the technique, but it was the thought that counted when it came to announcing one's special moves. Tucking in his legs and driving them into Cologne's hamstrings, to make sure she couldn't get into a defensive spin, Ranma's arms shot out, tightening the razor edged garrote. All that was left to do was to flex his arms and behead her.

Except…

His arms wouldn't move.

Looking to his right, he saw Cologne's hand holding his wrist. On her knees, nearly choking, blind, she had still managed to read the position of his body by their contact points! Bending one of her knees up, she tucked into a forward roll that sent Ranma into the ground, with her on top. Face down, with her back to his, his mind raced to find a counter. Then he felt, through her, that she was lifting her legs up, to point vertically into the air.

'Oh… fuck me…'

"Eight Points Rising Moon…"

Ranma squeezed his eyes shut as his entire body pressed into the ground and corkscrewed in place. Grinding against the packed earth of the garden floor, around and around and around, his armor wailed from the friction and from the pieces that tore straight off… then, when it seemed as if it wouldn't end, a tremendous force built up behind him. He knew what it was: all the accumulated forces from before were about to uncoil, and hammer him even further into the unyielding ground.

It felt like one of those heavy American cars had driven off a bridge and landed on his lower back. He never saw Cologne twist up into the air and off his body. Lying in a circle of torn personal armor, having drilled a crater into the ground with his body, Ranma blacked out for all of a second. Then, painfully, his arm moved and he slowly crawled back onto his feet. What was left of his personal armor was a mess. The torso section, the sturdiest, was mostly intact, but the arms had been sheared off trying to protect his face, and his helmet had simply been torn from its connection port.

Wiping blood from his forehead, Ranma had to admit:

"That was pretty good…"

He stood, facing the woman, back in her infuriating stance. Ranma flexed his fingers, and golden _ki_ began to build between the digits. But his confidence wasn't high, and the technique was far from peak levels of output. For a moment, he regretted not taking a cue from Ryouga and developing a self-aggrandizing mental technique. But blind confidence was as dangerous as it was powerful, especially in a fight like this.

"Giving up on fighting me hand to hand?" Cologne asked, seeing through his technique and its weakness. "Isn't that like admitting you're not good enough to beat me? If you can't fight me honestly, do you really think you can beat me with special techniques?"

Ranma gritted his teeth, anger rising and confidence falling.

"Hey, Ranma," a voice cut in, and the pigtailed one turned to see Ryouga standing on top of one of the plant formations, his arms crossed.

"Want me to sub in for a while?"

The golden _ki_ in Ranma's hands evaporated, and he turned to face Cologne with a savage look of unquestioned determination. It wasn't likely his _ki_ attack would be able to win the fight, anyway, no matter how confident he was. Luckily, he had alternatives.

Sub in, huh?

"TO **HELL** WITH THAT!!"

A twister of air, burning hot and glacially cold, swirled around him like a tempest. Cologne's mouth turned into a petite "o" as a gale force wind tossed back her hair and sent ripples down the fabric of her titian ethereal habit.

"Toppatsu Higi Hyöga Reppö Soku!"  
(Instant Secret Art - Glacier Storm Breath)

Holding out his hands, and exhaling deeply, flakes of ice began to collect, first on Ranma's fingers and then creeping, like fine spiderwebs, up his arms. Cologne hadn't put out one iota of hot _ki_ yet, which meant he had to supply both cold, via the soul of ice, and heat, via anger. It wasn't normally possible, but Ranma had discovered the technique's secret back door, and learned to _specifically alternate_ between hot and cold battle auras. He was about to show Cologne just what that meant.

"You think you've beaten me?!" Taking a strong step forward, he thrust his right fist forward. "You're wrong! Dead Wrong!!"

"Hiryu Hyou Töppa!!"  
(Flying Dragon Ice Breakthrough)

Ice and Fire, hot and cold, twisted into a spiral tornado, first wide enough to swallow a train, and then narrowing down into a confined beam as thin as an arm. At the end of that beam, alien plants froze solid and shattered, torn into incalculable pieces. It was telekinetic temperature control, mastered through repeated refinement of the _Hiryu Shoten Ha_, coupled with extremely powerful and tightly confined wind.

And it moved.

Cologne skipped easy to the side, as the beam tried to dwell on her position. Ducking under it as it slashed, back and forth, Cologne flipped out of the way as Ranma brought it down in a vertical slice. Not getting anywhere with the initial approach, Ranma gritted his teeth, and the horizontal tornado started to distort - becoming less a beam, and more a snake. It coiled this way and that, the tip always freezing and tearing apart whatever it hit. Cologne vanished in a burst of speed, and this time Ranma jumped, avoiding a descending heel kick. He snapped out his left arm, and a tornado formed and detached, spinning like a top towards his opponent and threatening to engulf her.

Cologne slipped around, spinning her body and neutralizing the outer rotational energy of the tornado. Then, her right hand shot out and back, as she buried her fingers into the tornado behind her. With a grunt of effort, feet skidding across the ground, the master martial artist spun and literally _hurled_ the tornado back in the direction it came.

Ranma leapt away from the spinning storm of wind and energy, first to the trunk of an alien plant, and then ten meters into the air, in the process losing the cohesion of his initial _Hiryu Hyou Töppa_. Kicking his feet, he fired a barrage of golden _ki_ attacks, inundating the area below. Cologne spun, deflecting those attacks that got within range with a sound like cymbals slamming together. Glowing orbs shot off in every direction, and the attacks she didn't knock aside hit the ground, but didn't explode.

Instead, they burned with a fiery intensity, saturating the area with heat.

"Gotcha! Hiryu Kourin Ha!!"  
(Rising Dragon Descending Blast)

Ranma's left fist shook with fury as he punched down, and as the heat from below rose up and met the downward spiral, the same trap that ensnared Sink back at the Amazon village surrounded Cologne. Wind swirled up all around her, pinning her in place while the descending dragon - the inverted tornado - fell to earth.

"One more time! Hiryu Hyou Töppa!!"  
(Flying Dragon Ice Breakthrough)

Once again, he thrust out his right arm, and an adjacent tornado formed within a column of cold air. It was a tornado within a tornado, and like before, it narrowed down to a freezing and merciless point. Cracks of ice radiated in every direction along the ground from the impact site; from within the _Hiryu Kourin Ha_. The mated vortexes twisted and trembled, and finally tore themselves apart. A flash of cold snap froze everything within half a dozen meters, turning plants and leaves, even in midair, into so many ice crystals.

Ranma landed on his feet, wisps of icy vapor rising out of his mouth. Crackles of ice still lingered on his arms, and he was breathing was heavy, labored. He coughed, hard, and licked his dry, frozen lips. His skin was pale, but starting to look healthier with each passing second, when he coughed again, harder than before. After a few moments, he started to breathe more slowly, and the icy vapor dissipated. Spitting off to his right, he watched as the winds died down around the frozen epicenter of his makeshift final attack. As the ice left on his body melted, it also conjured up another problem.

Looking down at his chest, Ranma dryly noted the sudden appearance of some "old friends." The D-cups, and the clingy and wet white undershirt he had worn under his armor, mocked him.

"Great! And now I'm a girl again," the he-turned-she grumbled in a soprano voice. "Goddamn Jyusenkyou…"

He/She also noted Ryouga standing off to the side, and smirked at his old enemy/rival.

"Looks like you were late again, P-chan."

"Ranma!" the lost boy snarled, shaking his fist. "How many times do I have to tell you not to…"

The angry Lieutenant of India Squad paused in mid sentence, staring at the center of what had been Ranma's attack. Easily visible now, they could both see a strange dome, frozen over with ice.

Cracking ice.

Bit by bit, the frozen water flaked away or melted, revealing a palette of black, brown, green and purple. It was instantly recognizable as the colors of the alien plants. It reminded Ranma of the plants he had seen Pink and Link use in the past. And with the threat of frozen annihilation all but gone, the shell began to constrict and melt away.

"Wood style…" Ranma whispered. Shampoo had told them about it, giving the class of techniques a workable name. According to Perfume's information, Cologne's strongest element in the _Wu Xing_ was water, followed equally by Wood and Metal. The latter dealt mostly with artifacts and weapons, and their use and manufacture. The former, Shampoo had explained, was mostly a set of medical and healing arts, with the ability to manipulate plants and animals. The principles were also known, in a scientific sense, to UNETCO… though the biokinetics they dealt with were mostly the result of psionic and telekinetic warfare (like using it to pop a blood vessel).

Emerging from within the shifting mass of plants, Cologne stood unharmed.

"You want to play with special techniques, do you?" She asked, stepping out of the shell, and holding out her hands. Tendrils of plant matter rose out of the ground, forming into vines that coiled around her forearms. In one of her palms, droplets of water began to coagulate and condense, while in the other, a snap of her fingers resulted in a shower of sparks.

"Great work, Ran-KO. Looks like you pissed her off."

"Hey. … Shut up."

The two rivals stared at each other. Ryouga was 100 percent … while Ranma had to admit that he was exhausted, hurting, and worst of all, in his girl form. He didn't want to admit it, but that last bit was a big problem. He hadn't trained or fought as a girl in a long time, and testing his aura with what little _ki_ he had left, he could tell that he wouldn't be able to pull off another _Hiryu Hyou Töppa_. Maybe if he was a guy, he could fire another, but not as a girl. A regular _Hiryu Shoten Ha_ was still possible, but Cologne had taught him the damn technique; there was no way she'd fall for it. Plus she was too damn fast. Summoning up a spark of confident _ki_, he narrowed his eyes in distaste.

'Maybe 20 percent of my reserves left, and that's being generous… I doubt I could fire a ki attack at more than 40 percent normal power. Generating all that hot and cold ki at the same time and all by myself… and I'm still sort of breathe…'

Blue eyes darted over to Ryouga.

"What makes you think you could do any better, P-chan?"

Ryouga's helmet turned; he was looking back, and Ranma could guess that he understood he'd never get an open invitation. Ranma Saotome would be beaten to a pulp before he cried for help, after all. Even if he was in over his head. Now, it wasn't that he'd… object to a little assistance, but he sure wouldn't **ask **for it.

"I won't know until I try."

It was close enough.

"Ok, ok, if you insist," Ranma agreed, glad Ryouga had caught the hint. His rival knew him as well as anyone, and the thought of that almost made the pigtailed fighter grin.

"I'll jump back in when it looks like she's about to finish you off."

"Thanks for that," Ryouga joked, and stepped between Ranma and Cologne.

"Ryouga…" Cologne said, having waited politely for them to decide who she'd fight. It was common courtesy, after all. Every martial artist understood that.

"Cologne," he replied, but without warmth.

"Are you sure you don't want to surrender?" she asked, assuming a combat stance. "I still think we resolve our differences using words…"

"Sorry," Ryouga replied, shaking his head. "I'd rather not. Besides, Nabiki seems to enjoy holding her microphone up to her speakers to keep you from tricking me with your voice. It isn't pleasant. And for God's sake, she can stop now. … Thank you."

Cologne lifted her chin, and her smile faded slightly.

"I see you boys have grown a bit too attached to your new roles..." Her eyes narrowed dangerously, and as her battle aura began to grow, sharp and hard, Ryouga could feel it cutting across his skin even through his armor. It wasn't massive, not like Happosai or even his own, but it was obviously honed and refined to a razor's edge.

"I didn't want to hurt either of you, but I can see the only way you'll come with me is by force…"

"That's unfortunate," she concluded.

And, without further warning, Cologne attacked.


	85. The Big Show V

**I'm back with the fic! Thanks for waiting!**

**Author's Note:**

One of the ongoing themes of this fic is that the characters become stronger as they train together and find strong motivations to fight. To that end, I have expanded basically everyone's repertoire of techniques and moves. Frankly, it seems silly that Ranma and company would be using the same techniques all their lives. Who could have guessed, reading the beginning of Ranma 1/2, that he would end the manga with the techniques he did? Given that, I have tried to make all the new techniques based on variants of old ones as much as possible.

* * *

_For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. Despite a surge of activity in the __Far East__ theatre, and fierce battles waged to unseat the Sirius Conspiracy and avenge the loss of the Joketsuzoku village, UNETCO and the two new squads have prevailed time and time again. With the threat of __Cologne__ and other second generation Trenchards (alien human hybrids) looming ahead, the high command readies for a strike at one of the planet's last remaining alien bases. For __India__ and Juliet squads, confrontation with these corrupted master martial artists is inevitable. Finally, the last great push to drive the entrenched alien presence off-Earth has begun. Only with that done, can XCOM bring the fight to the stars._

* * *

Up on the roof of the Tendo home, the night air was cool; a soothing balm on the wounds he nursed. There was nothing particularly special about it otherwise. It was a Thursday, or maybe a Friday, and late enough that Nerima's lights had dimmed. The stars shone in vivid display far above, tantalizing in their unassailable heights. Ryouga sucked on the split lip Ranma had given him a few hours before, and took in a deep breath. The smell of Kasumi's cooking, even well after everyone had eaten, still lingered enough for him to smell the ingredients and remember the tastes. The neighbor's dog took that moment to bark, twice, at nothing in particular before retiring for the night.

Tucking in one leg and leaning forward, Ryouga took a few seconds to direct his attention to his rival and the woman they both loved. Ranma had joined him on the roof, as they often did, and eventually so had Akane. He hadn't spoken much in that time, but he had listened. Being P-chan, he had learned to listen without being able to speak, and the tendency suited his personal moods regardless. The two teenagers had gone the entire time without yelling at each other, and the stolen looks between them made his heart ache. Now Ranma lay sprawled on the roof, asleep, and Akane had dozed off next to him.

Their hands were almost touching.

Ryouga licked his injured lower lip. It would be gone by tomorrow, and so would he. Let everyone think he'd just dropped by to make sure "Ranma wasn't slacking off" or to "teach that Saotome a lesson." The truth was, even when trying to find Akari's farm, he often wished he was headed for the Tendo Dojo instead. It wasn't just checking in with Akane, either, especially since he could still barely get in a handful of stuttering words with her. It broke his heart to come here, but at least he felt alive when he did. So he and Ranma had fought a bit, exchanging some insults and threats…

It had been an ok fight. Nothing too special. Akane had watched them for a while, throwing in a cursory, "why are you two always fighting" remark. Soun and Genma had moved their endless game of _shogi_ to a safe spot where they wouldn't be hit or distracted by the inevitable splashing from the pond. Nabiki had hung around, but never found a good picture to take. And Kasumi… Kasumi had smiled and invited him to dinner.

Ryouga glanced at Akane again.

'I can't hang around as P-chan anymore…' he reminded himself. He was still tempted to, but the truth was that it hurt more than it helped. After being held by a woman who loved him, as a genuine human being, he couldn't go back to being loved as some pet pig. Before all this, he could justify it by saying he was keeping Akane safe, but really, Ranma had _killed_ for her. Ranma would always be there for her. Ranma was, despite his faults, the _better_ man.

The bastard always had been.

'I hate this place…' he couldn't help but think, bitterness filling his turbulent mind. 'But I can't stop coming back.'

Akari.

He stared up at the sky and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and index finger. Akari was the girl he had in his wallet. Her picture. Not Akane's. When he visited her, she was glad to see him in a way Akane never would. That was where he belonged, so why, why the Hell did he keep coming here? Why, when he saw her farm in the distance after weeks of wandering, did he even _briefly_ think about going somewhere else? Why did feeling wanted, desired - the very thing he had always dreamed of - why did it feel so… forced?

Why was he still unhappy?

Slumping back against the roof, the lost boy stared up at the endless night sky.

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia  
**Chapter XXIX  
_The Big Show – Part II_

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

Ryouga had originally been joking when he had chastised Ranma for pissing Cologne off. It quickly ceased to be funny in any sense of the word. He had seen some of the fight with the youthful former Matriarch and taken the opportunity to think up some ideas of his own in how to fight her. Ranma had failed at close combat and subsequently abandoned it as an effective means of defeating her, but the lost boy was less inclined to rely purely on trading special techniques. Aside from being physically stronger, he also planned to mix it up in grappling range, where he could use his Killing Point to maximum effect.

Pity Colonge wasn't very obliging; the no-longer-quite-so-old girl was spamming techniques like it was the _End of the God Damned World_.

Running at full tilt across a wall of tiered alien metal and soil, he deflected a ball of blazing fire, ducked, spinning, under a crescent shaped stream of water that sliced into the plants behind him, before pushing off the wall as the tendril of water curved around and cut into the floor. A ball of light ignited between his fingers, not as an attack, but as an extension of his battle aura. It engulfed the stream of water, and in that brief instant, Ryouga telekinetically willed it to evaporate. His training with the Breaking Point was such that he could destroy almost anything with it, and that fact was really all that had kept him alive this far into the fight.

Water based attack: dodge and destroy. Fire based attack: intercept and push through. That was how he had approached Cologne's many assaults. Notably, she hadn't even bothered to try and fight him using any earth based techniques, perhaps recognizing that it wasn't an efficient use of her mental energy. Feeling a momentary lull between her attacks, he stomped his heel, sending a tremor through the ground and towards where she stood, toes barely trailing over the ground as she moved.

Luckily, being an alien garden, the ground was porous and the plates of alien alloy were thin and unsecured except to a fragile mesh. This was likely to make any rearrangements of the gardens easier, but it also meant he could use the proper Breaking Point as necessary. As expected, Cologne glided by faster than the tunneling breaking point could follow, avoiding triggering a detonation.

She was fast on her feet, just like Ranma, and as she gracefully moved her arms out and then up two tendrils of water rose up and at each of Ryouga's sides. He didn't panic. Perfume had warned them about this trick, and about its limitation: his training in the various permutations of the Breaking Point provided an excellent defense. Disrupting the _ki_ holding the water in its edge wouldn't get rid of the weapon, such as it was, but it would take the bite from its mouth.

Adding spin to his aura as he moved, the liquid scissors splashed harmlessly against his personal armor. The problem with that approach was that it was easier for Cologne to call up more water and reform its cutting edge than it was for him to keep disrupting or evaporating everything she threw at him. The thin sheets of water drew back, and Ryouga back flipped as another curtain of flame barreled down in his position. Clamping her mouth shut, Cologne's youthful face twisted in surprise as she cocked her head to the side, avoiding a glowing bolt of mint green plasma.

Ryouga quickly holstered his plasma pistol and cursed under his breath. The only good thing about those fire attacks was that they blocked her vision as much as it blocked his, giving him an opportunity to counterattack. It was the same mistake Saffron had made when fighting Ranma back in the day. Cologne wasn't quite as oblivious to the weaknesses in that element. Blowing a bit of smoke out from between her petite lips, she drew back slightly. Ryouga could feel the growing and contracting of her battle aura, the razor sharp edges of it shooting out and back in.

"Ryouga…" he heard his name, and Nabiki's voice.

Even from her desk in far off Seiran Mountain, she could tell that something big was forthcoming. There was no time to respond to her. Instead, the lost boy's eyes found Ranma, rapidly recovering from a relatively safe spot further away. If need be, the two of them could trade Cologne off between them, wearing her out and buying time until more troops arrived. Ideally with Powered Armor, big guns, and hovertanks. His hand wandered down to his waist and towards a refitted alien grenade.

There was no way he was going to play fair, not with so much at stake.

Then Cologne brought her hands together, and the ceiling erupted. Twisted metal rained down amid a torrent of water, first one then two and then three. She had telekinetically torn apart the garden's sprinkler and irrigation systems, and within moments, Cologne vanished behind a wall of surging water. Narrowing his eyes, Ryouga could just barely see her outline.

'Some sort of shield?' he had time to wonder, and little else.

The water _moved_.

A solid wall of it, higher than a man, wider than three men, shot out. The front of it was flat and sheer, and Ryouga barely dodged out of its way. It hit the wall behind with a titanic crash, and when it pulled back, he could see a square indentation in the area it had struck. In that instant, he mentally calculated that Cologne's attack probably put out two or even two and a half times the force per square inch of even one of _his_ blows.

Cologne hadn't announced the names of any of her techniques so far (a testament to her mastery of them, as announcing the name often helped to concentrate on the technique's execution – it wasn't _just_ for fun), but the lost one had tried to keep a running tally of what he had seen. Given the force behind this attack, Fist of the Sea or Deep Ocean Bullet seemed appropriate names for the After Action Report. Still, if it was just that, he could stay one step ahead of…

Suddenly, the block of water morphed, sharp edges growing out of flat surfaces.

"Shit!"

Acting on instinct, he blew a breaking point directly ahead of himself, flipping up one of the metal plates to form a makeshift shield. The wall of cutting water – it must have been seven meters long, and thigh height – barely skidded off the alien alloy with the sound of a razor blade running across a blackboard. A wave washed overhead as Ryouga ducked. The move had probably saved his life, but he didn't dwell on his good luck or quick thinking. Taking a wide step towards the uprooted metal plate, sheltering under it, and then pushing up as he jumped, Ryouga broke the surface of the water all around him. His feet moving faster than the eye could see, he spun, and tossed the makeshift shield like a discus.

The spinning buzzsaw of a projectile landed with a thunk in the center of Cologne's water shield, sending a ripple of cracks through the suddenly icy surface. In seconds, it reformed, turned back into a liquid, and expelled the harmless metal panel. Landing on the ground, with the water receding back towards its master, Ryouga's eyes narrowed as a savage grin spread across his features.

He watched the wall of water as it reformed. "So it's like that, huh?"

Cologne remained a dark shadow, like a shark cruising silently beneath the surface. As he felt out what she had planned next, he couldn't help but add a little something to the one person he could be sure would hear him.

"Nabiki…" he said, voice betraying his excitement. "Watch this."

And then it began anew. A tidal wave of water rose up, and suddenly surged forward, this time as a massive cone. It crashed into the ground, tearing apart anything in its path and leaving a trail of frozen ice in its wake. Ryouga ducked and dodged, contorting his body as he pressed his speed and flexibility to the limit. Three times the massive lance of water tried to pin him, before splitting in two, both spears striking with the speed of a bullet. For all its speed, it was still easy to see the attack coming, and dodge in time to avoid the massive point.

Then Ryouga disappeared in a cloud of dust.

Behind the smoke screen for only a second, a duet of screaming _ki_ blasts erupted from the cloud, spraying droplets in every direction along their path. The twins slammed into Cologne's shield with enough force to punch through a reinforced concrete wall, leaving two frozen craters in their wake. The water lances withdrew momentarily as the shield reformed, and then they continued their assault. This time, instead of simple lances, the water morphed into balls after impact, propagating as another lance in another direction.

Ryouga made full use of the terrain as he dodged and fired. It was impossible to dodge all of them (perhaps Ranma could have managed it, he was annoyed to admit), but just as often he had to block or weather the blow. His natural constitution and personal armor helped to mitigate the damage, but each strike, no matter the force behind it, left ice in its wake. Worse, Cologne's attacks seemed to continue, even as she began new ones, and in seconds propagating lances were bouncing off the walls from almost every direction.

Most, however, went off in places where he couldn't have dodged to, even if he had tried. He was sure that he had seen the weakness to her technique: using both the water lances and the water shield meant that damage to the latter left her nearly blind. His response, then, was to act before she managed to overwhelm hit him due to luck, or as a result of his looming fatigue. That was fine; it was what he had suspected from the beginning, when Cologne's attacks paused just after he had struck with that panel of alien metal.

Blocking one of the bounding spears, and feeling the condensation collect even on the inside of his armor, forming pinpricks of crystal on his skin, Ryouga leveled his other hands and fired another blazing _shishi hokoudan_. Just as before, it crashed headlong and screaming into Cologne's liquid barrier, which stiffened and froze in response. Unlike last time, there was an object also embedded in the icy crater, carried along inside the _ki_ attack. Warped and crushed, the overstressed smoke grenade exploded within the ice, just as it started to reform. In an instant, dark clouds spread through the liquid barrier.

Half of the lances kept jumping from wall to wall, but the main body wavered. Within in, Cologne was blinded and hesitant.

"Now!" Ryouga held out his left hand, clutching a plasma grenade between half frozen fingers. "I've got you!"

One more flash; one more _shishi hokoudan surprise_.

But not fast enough. The main body of water contracted, forming additional defensive layer around the first. The _ki_ blast couldn't punch through, and when the embedded plasma grenade went off, it blew the barrier into a vast cloud of steam that expanded in every direction, blinding everyone. Cursing, he changed his stance and began to build his mental energy for something new.

If he just had time…

Then he heard a rush of water from every direction, and looking down, Ryouga could see that there was water everywhere, all the way up to his ankles. His eyes widened a moment before the water flash froze and lifted into the air. Unable to extradite himself in time with the breaking point the lost one received an introduction to the ceiling at over fifty miles per hour. The ice floor met the ceiling and shattered into a billion pieces. Ryouga hung for a moment, flattened against the ceiling, and then just starting to fall… when another wave of ice and water rose up and slammed into him.

Followed by another and then another.

Then a fifth, which, unlike the others, shattered just feet from the ceiling. A pale green light grew in that instant, even as another solid pillar, the sixth and largest, rose up to meet the trapped martial artist. Onward and upward it pressed, into the light and almost into the ceiling, before stopping. There, pressed between the rising pillar and the ceiling, between the immovable rock and irresistible force, Ryouga crouched, tucked almost into a ball. He had his feet to the pillar and his shoulders and back to the ceiling, and as he pushed downward with all the incredible power in his body, the glow grew in intensity. Hands pressed against the ceiling, he heaved, and the pillar of ice below his feet cracked and wavered. Straightening his body out, the pillar below splintered and then exploded from within as the green glow tore down from his feet and through the ice.

Ryouga landed with a splash in a pool of water, body sore and breathing labored. On the other side of the ruined and flooded alien garden, Cologne emerged from the murky waters he had clouded just moments before. It still shifted and swirled around her, as if unsure whether it could switch roles from shield to lance without dirtying all the water in the place. Ultimately, it settled, and expanded away. Amid it all, Cologne tossed her long dark hair and gently brushed a few itinerant strands away from her eyes.

"What fine control over ki you have… Ryouga-kun," Cologne used the same nickname Nabiki did, and even the same tone, but he couldn't help but shiver when the corrupted former Matriarch said it.

"Your mastery of the breaking point actually exceeds my own, and to use your Roaring Lion Shot to deliver a grenade… I would have never thought of that," she continued, and with her hair well and out of the way, Cologne bored into him with piercing, hungry eyes.

She softly clapped her hands a few times.

"Yes, you're just as I hoped," she added with what some would call a leer. "In return, how about I show you some techniques that are mine, and mine alone?"

"Careful…" Nabiki warned, whispering in his ear. As if he needed her to tell him _that_.

Cologne laughed; a beautiful, melodious sound under other circumstances.

"Watch closely. I once used this technique to wipe out an entire village in ten minutes…"

Cologne held out her right arm, and slashed the vein at her wrist with one of the fingers on her left hand. With a single sweeping movement, she sprayed blood in a crimson arc in front of her. It was a pale red, not so bright as a human's, not anymore, and it quickly mingled with the water at their feet. Ryouga watched; he could see the points of her _ki_, still glowing white hot despite detaching from her body, intermixed with the dull patchwork glow that suffused the water itself.

"Water and Metal Style," Cologne announced, in English and with no small hint of amusement. "Form One: Earth Sickening Water."

The water began to churn, and Ryouga felt a chill run up his spine. The drops of blood weren't just diffusing in the water… from near Cologne, a dark hue began to expand. Clear water turned impossibly inky dark. As it came closer, Ryouga felt his acute danger sense begin to scream a warning. Taking a few steps back, and then turning to run, he jumped high and out of the water entirely, grabbing onto the broken trunk of a fallen alien tree before flipping up to another garden terrace. On the lowest level, in the water, he could see a few scattered leaves and branches crumple and burn.

'So it'll be like before, but with acid instead of water?'

He narrowed his eyes as the water started to churn and boil.

'All I have to do is not get hit. Wear her down. Let Ranma find one of those weakness Perfume mentioned…'

"Ryouga!" Nabiki interrupted, sounding nearly panicked. "The NBC chemical scrubber is detecting some sort of organophosphate in the air… possibly a nerve agent… along with benzyl and hydrogen chloride. Containment is holding, but the filter is going to start breaking down…!"

Ryouga realized it, just then. It wasn't _just_ the acid. Cologne's technique poisoned the air itself. She really could wipe out an entire village… even a small town… with this one terrible technique. Perfume had warned them that Cologne could mix traditional elemental based techniques, but nothing like this! Gritting his teeth, he steeled his nerves. Was he afraid of Cologne? Yes. There was little sense trying to hide it. Would he let it get to him?

**Hell no!**

He jumped off the terrace as his opponent started to gather up her next attack, shifting into the offensive. Flipping through the air, his aligned himself so his feet were headed right for the sea of poison that covered the entire floor of the alien garden. He could hear Nabiki's gasp in his ears, and see the look of surprise on Cologne's face as he fell. And the black water around the soles of his boots blew away.

Ranma wasn't the only one who could fire a _ki_ attack from his feet!

* * *

Ukyou braced herself behind her mega spatula as a torrent of fire washed over her immediate left and right. Shielded as she was, and insulted by her personal armor, she barely felt the heat. It was a nice little layer of protection, and she trusted in her weapon to protect her. The lessons she had learned training with India Squad were second nature now, and her body tensed in silent anticipation of going into the counteroffensive.

Except the moment she started to move, another attack slammed into her position, forcing her into a protective crouch and cover. To a martial artist with a battle accelerated sense of time, it felt like she had been hiding behind cover for an hour. The attacks simply never let up. One after another, they beat down in her.

This wasn't how Ranma had described Rouge's fighting style.

It had been assumed from that start that many of the martial artists and other unique individuals Ranma and Ryouga knew of, but hadn't found themselves, had been captured or killed by the aliens. Rouge was one of those not accounted for, and so the two squads had been informed of how to face her in a potential fight. From what Ukyou had been briefed on, Rouge relied entirely on her inhuman techniques using fire, lightning, and light. She was not physically powerful: she couldn't hit hard, and she couldn't take any strong blows. But she still got tired. She still fatigued.

Something was different with her.

Activating a switch on the hilt of her battle spatula, a transparent window appeared in the metal flat of the weapon. It was one of the properties of alien alloys, and it had been helpfully incorporated into her new weapon for just such an occasion: to help her see while sheltering behind cover. Between gouts of fire, she could just make out Rouge's cursed form. The girl was in her transformed state: that of a six armed, three headed demon woman. But, unless Ukyou was mistaken, Rouge seemed to have grown larger than when Tofu had first introduced her.

Ukyou watched carefully as a series of explosions went off near the cursed woman. One of the heads pivoted, turning the wide fountain of fire coming out of her mouth into a narrow stream. Bright orange pulses rippled through the solid stream of fire. Each of the heads seemed identical, aside from slight differences in hair style, but two seemed to be constantly spouting fire. The third, in the middle, seemed to be watching for attacks and directing the others to intercept them. Rouge's skin was a pale and deathly white, and as she adjusted her stance, Ukyou could see a ripple of color flow across the demon's flesh. Rouge took a step, raised two of her six hands, and seemed to grow slightly taller. Lightning crackled between those two hands, and Ukyou saw a brief opening.

Planting the wide end of her spatula into the ground, Ukyou jumped and tucked, putting her feet up against the flat of the blade and continuing to use it as a shield. Rouge's head never let up on the stream of fire, but the change in angle gave Ukyou a shot. Trying her best to aim her carbine with just one hand, Ukyou fired on full automatic. The recoil from the plasma rifle threw off most of her shots, but at least two were center of mass… except the plasma itself detonated well in front of Rouge as it entered her flame barrier.

Ukyou cursed to herself as she landed on top of one of the smaller parked UFOs in the garage, once again engulfed by a stream of fire. It was annoying that their improved and upgraded plasma weapons, replacements for lasers and projectiles, were the least effective here. Whatever Rouge's Flame Barrier was, it caused a premature disruption of the plasma bolt. Lasers would probably have gone right through, and even if it was hot enough to melt a projectile, it would still have that initial momentum behind it to do some damage.

Through the window, she could see a barrage of shuriken in the distance, where Konatsu and Shampoo were busy fighting the good Doctor. In retrospect, given the plasma problem, it probably would have been better to let Shampoo try and manage something. Unfortunately, Konatsu had decided that Ukyou was the strongest on defense and against area of effect attacks, making her the best to handle the berserk Hindu demigod. The sound of a thunderclap made Ukyou instinctively brace herself, and just as the sound hit her ears, a lightning bolt slammed into her Hera-sama.

Luckily, this version of her battle spatula didn't conduct electricity.

Another "Thunder Heaven Snakes Retribution" strike hit… followed by a third and a fourth, while Ukyou's mind raced to think up some way to turn the tables on her enemy. Simply sitting tight and waiting for Konatsu and Shampoo to beat Tofu and come to her aid wasn't sounding particularly prudent, and her initial plan of waiting for Rouge to tire wasn't panning out.

"How long do you plan to hide from my power?" Rouge's center head finally spoke, in a voice as deep as any Ukyou had ever heard. "That weapon of yours… vexes me…"

While the two other heads continued spitting flame, the middle one spat into two of her hands. Eyes glowing bright green, tendrils of flame rose out of Rouge's palms, forming a burning whip and sword, black as pitch and engulfed by fire. In the two middle hands, lightning crackled ominously, and in the bottom pair, blazing conflagrations pulsed, leaving a trail of fire and smoke in their wake.

Ukyou smirked from behind her weapon.

So: a flaming whip, a sword of fire, two fireballs, two blasts of lightning, two walls of fire, and one barrier of flame. It was a bit much, but she could work with it.

"Konadan!"  
(Flour Bomb)

Rouge hissed in anger as her target disappeared in a cloud of thick white smoke. Striking with her flaming whip, she probed the area, but hit nothing of any substance. Her left and right heads closed their mouths, shutting off their breath of flame. Six eyes searched around her, looking for any sign of movement. For a few seconds, there was nothing, and the more impatient of Rouge's three heads began to scream for the other two to charge in. The other was more content to fall back. As usual, the center head had to make the decision for the three of them.

Rouge had little to no warning sense, like her martial arts opponent did, but her reflexes were definitely above human, and she could literally look in three directions at once. She saw Ukyou's attack coming, and quickly jumped to the side as a giant spatula slashed into the ground where she had just been standing, the sharpened edges making a horrible scraping sound. With her lower two arms, Rouge unleashed a flurry of fireballs into the smoke, aiming for where the attack had originated. She was too slow in the counterattack; Ukyou's mega spatula retracted, pulled back into the cloud of flour via an almost invisible metal wire. Along the way it deflected the fire headed in that direction.

Rouge hissed, flame leaking out of her flared nostrils.

Another flour bomb went off to her left, almost immediately followed by a handful of smaller, thrown spatulas. Holding up two of her arms to block the strikes, knowing they would penetrate her protective flaming body aura, Rouge struck back with lightning. She could hear it hit something, and guessed that it was likely the giant weapon her opponent used. Pivoting and striking with her flaming whip, Rouge again hit only the floor. Her other hands plucked out the three spatulas buried into her uppermost left arm, tossing the offending items to the ground.

Then a third smoke bomb went off, and this time Rouge struck without hesitating. Twin infernos left two of her mouths, followed by a barrage of lightning and fire from her middle and lower arms. Running towards her pinned opponent to press the attack, she succeeded in blowing away much of the vision obscuring flour. Amid the conflagration, Rouge could see the mega spatula being used as a shield. She had seen her opponent use it like that before, and knew it left her almost immobile.

Rouge's center head laughed gleefully. "I'm going to cook you in your own armor, you little roach!"

Rounding the side of the weapon, all three of Rouge's heads blinked in surprise.

There was no one there.

Rouge never even noticed the small M86 Pursuit-Deterrent Munition that had been taped to the floor behind the spatula. All the three headed _asura_-cursed woman knew was that, in the span of a second, she had been blown off her feet and into the air, the entire front of her body screaming in pain. As an alien-altered Trenchard, injuries didn't mean as much to her body as before, and her minds instantly clicked off their pain response.

Even with injures like this, she could still fight!

Then one of Rouge's heads saw movement out of the corner of her eye right before a roundhouse kick slammed into it. Rouge's backward momentum turned into a spin, and the other heads winced as the third lost a pair of teeth to the blow. In desperation, Rouge flared up her omnidirectional defenses: first her flame aura, and then a blast of bright white light. At this range, it would have flash fried any normal human being nearby, and blinded them through their eyelids.

Instead, that same damnable wall of metal blocked everything.

'How can she take cover so quickly?!' Rouge barely had time to think, before Ukyou emerged out of her weapon's cover, spinning the spatula overhead.

"Okonomiyaki Combo!" The girl yelled, her weapon crashing down. "Number Four!"

Rouge blocked the downward blow with the flaming sword still in her uppermost left hand, supported by the hilt of her flaming whip in the other. Her rightmost head, which had been preparing to fire another breath of flame, tried to scream a warning but was too late. Ukyou stepped in after her first strike had been countered, reversed her massive weapon, and struck up with the opposite end of her spatula. It buried itself into Rouge's torso, and with upper body strength alone, Ukyou hoisted and flipped Rouge off her feet and into the air.

Rouge's center head coughed fire, but Ukyou's weapon spun, deflecting it before coming around in another blow with the flat of the blade. Rouge took the strike without being able to mount a defense, the blow thundering with an explosive boom. The Jyusenkyou cursed _asura_ spun like a top in midair. Helpless, she felt another blow like before come up from below, and then another, juggling her in the air before a fourth came down and sent her crashing to the floor.

Ukyou stood over her opponent, smoking mega spatula in one hand, the other on her hip.

"Well now, I guess three heads ain't much better than one after all!" The chef planted a booted foot onto the small of Rouge's back to keep her face (or faces) down. "I'd stay down if I were you."

"And here I was hoping to jump in and save you," a voice said from behind her. Ukyou didn't turn her head to acknowledge it. Instead, she ducked down, and finished Rouge off with a stun-stick to the back of each head.

"I'm no damsel in distress," she finally replied, glancing over her shoulder. "And you're no white knight."

"I guess not," Ryu admitted, shrugging his shoulders enough for the gesture to be seen despite his UNETCO issue personal armor. "But if this were a manga, you'd get in over your head and I'd make a dramatic entrance and say something cool. And you'd be like: 'Ryu! He made it!' Now you've stolen my thunder."

"Sorry." Ukyou sounded more jesting than contrite, ribbing him with her elbow.

"You might get the chance to save Shampoo or Konatsu, though," she added teasingly as the two headed towards where the one remaining fight; the two aforementioned martial artists facing Dr. Tofu. "I'm sure either of them will reward you with a kiss if you ask nicely enough. Konatsu could even show you his 'Crimson Hell' techniques…"

"I think I'll pass." Ryu landed on the top of a landed UFO, and Ukyou took up a spot next to him. On the Large Scout adjacent to them, Dr. Tofu seemed to be cornered by Konatsu and Shampoo. Still, he didn't seem to be anything but bored by the whole affair.

"Well, well," he spoke up, voice betraying only mild amusement. "I never would have expected you to beat Rouge all by yourself, Miss Kuonji. Not only have you improved, but it seems you were a bad match up for her. Cologne will be disappointed."

"Give up, Doctor," Ukyou yelled back at the man. "Let us take you in! We can help cure you!"

Tofu's inhuman face twisted into a macabre grin.

"How naive you are," he replied, and pointed at her. "All this means is that I can replace Rouge with someone more suitable."

"What does…" Ukyou's voice trailed off.

"Ukyou? What's…?" Ryu started to turn towards her. Why had her voice given out like that? Ignoring the warnings from his well honed _sakkijutsu_, he blinked and a moment later fell backwards, Ukyou's battle spatula buried in his chest. Falling flat on his back, he never got to even finish his sentence.

"Ryu!" Konatsu yelled, but didn't dare make a move.

Shampoo just frowned.

"Hmm," Tofu mused with a sad sound. "Betty, let them see your face, my dear."

With shaking hands, Ukyou unhooked and pulled off her helmet. Her eyes were wide and unblinking, tears welling up and running down her cheeks. Yanking back her right arm, she caught her mega spatula with the same hand. The end of it was stained red with blood.

"Come now, don't struggle. I don't like to see my Betty frown like that." Tofu remarked, and Ukyou's mouth curled into a small smile totally contradictory to the terror and helpless fear in her eyes.

"Much better," the former doctor sounded satisfied. Without even a gesture on his part, Ukyou's body jumped and landed next to him.

"Mind control?" Shampoo quietly asked over the Team Comm.

As if sensing the question, though unable to hear it, Tofu held up one thin finger.

"No," he corrected. "This isn't mind control in the conventional sense. Earlier, I activated a pressure point used for deep meditation. This separates the objective part of the mind from the subjective, the impulse from the action so to speak. The result is akin to sleep paralysis. You see, I don't like the idea of invading someone's mind and fighting them there. Too many things can go wrong. This… solves that problem."

"While in this meditative state, her body is my new Betty: a skeleton with strings attached." Tofu's lipless smile widened just slightly. "And as a bonus, this girl is fully aware of her actions, and feels everything her body does, so she can enjoy _being Betty_ too."

The two standing members of Juliet Squad stared him down.

"And for some reason, I don't think you'd destroy this Betty as callously as the last one," Tofu said with a dark chuckle, referring specifically to Konatsu.

The male kunoichi didn't respond, but his fists were balled tight.

Instead, Shampoo stepped forward.

"Good. Good! This is a good chance to settle things with her," the Amazon spoke up, using her armor's external speakers. Taking off her helmet, Shampoo let it fall to the ground along with her plasma pistol and laser rifle.

"Shampoo…?" Konatsu began to say, voice half angry half relieved.

"Worry about yourself, girly-boy," Shampoo snapped back at him, retrieving a single edges Dao sword from her armor's attached backpack. Her smile widened into a bloodthirsty grin. "What do you say, Doctor?"

"I don't care what order you die in," he replied. "But I should warn you, don't underestimate this Betty just because I'll be putting her on autopilot."

Battle spatula twirling in her hands, Ukyou took a few steps forward, the bladed edges of her weapon shooting up sparks where it slashed into the upper level of the landed UFO below her. Shampoo snarled and charged right at her, crashing into the other girl and driving her back, sword blocked by spatula. With a roar, the stronger Chinese fighter sent Ukyou flying back and off of the UFO only to jump after her.

Tofu let them go, preferring to stare lazily at Konatsu.

"Would you prefer to watch them?" he casually inquired. "Or do you still want to fight me?"

Konatsu's hands unclenched and the right one slowly reached for the sword strapped to his belt. Faint waves of red _ki_ began to drift away from his body as a battle aura began to grow around him. Konatsu knew he wasn't like Ranma or Ryouga. His personality was too passive minded to easily generate a powerful aura of emotional _ki_. He couldn't even muster much killing intent, given that he didn't like to hurt others. Worse, he rarely felt very angry or offended when others abused him. Until Ukyou, he'd never even been enraged over the treatment he had seen others face either.

But this… this was unforgivable!

"Fighting me isn't wise," Tofu warned, sounding completely unimpressed by the display. "You are weaker than me, after all."

"I'm not going to fight you," Konatsu answered, lowering his arms. "I'm going to **kill** you!"

* * *


	86. The Big Show VI

Blasts of green tinted mental energy erupting with every step, Ryouga ran headlong towards Cologne, surrounded as she was by a small lake of churning acidic death. Below him, her Sickening Water blasted away from each footfall, thanks to small precise _shishi hokoudans_ released from the soles of his feet. He knew he was gambling everything on a frontal attack, but he knew it was probably the last thing Cologne expected anyone to do in this situation. He couldn't let her dictate the terms and flow of the fight.

Depression, anger and sheer bloody-mindedness warred within his mind and across his boiling battle aura. This was what he had trained so hard for! Trained to exhaustion, researched to perfection! If he lost, then he was just the second rate failure everyone had always thought him to be! He dwelled on those failures, those setbacks, those losses… and they only fed into his depression and anger.

Cologne's left hand twitched; a curl of black cut through the air; he ducked under it. Her middle fingers dipped; two whirlpools appeared out of nowhere just ahead of him; he rotated, and let his feet skid across the ground on a board of telekinetic energy. She frowned; a wall of water began to rise, like a swell, to cut him off below the waist; he jumped. She lifted her hands; more walls of black water rose to his left and right, almost the entire length of the room, threatening to flatten him between them. Firing a _shishi hokoudan_ into the left one, he blasted through the hole and withdrew a single bandanna from his arm.

"**Die!** **Cologne****!**" He spun on his heel, making two one hundred and eighty degree spins and building momentum. A great green glow wrapped around his hand, and then he let it fly. Engulfing the bandanna within it, the _ki_ swirled and broke apart, forming rippling arms.

The Amazon matriarch immediately recognized the hybrid attack, and with a quick thrust of her arm, countered it.

"Living Shark Fists!"

Sweeping her arms to the side, two inky black fins emerged from the shallow water, followed by two more, and then two more, with every sweep of her arms. The first two raced ahead, and crested, jumping out of the water in the form of a sleek sixteen foot predator, crashing into Ryouga's own hybrid attack. The Earth Sickening Water that made up the shark's bodies tore apart from the force and from the rotation of Ryouga's attack.

Rather than look surprised, Cologne's lips curled back into a snarl as the buzzsaw of burning iron cloth and unstable energy narrowly missed her, barely deflected by cutting through two of her _samekens_. Ryouga, meanwhile, skipped up and just over two of the circling pseudo-sharks. Both jumped from the water to try and intercept him, watery mouths gaping with acidic teeth. Avoiding them by inches, he turned, hit the ground, and detonated two breaking points just ahead of him, blowing the final two shark fists into pieces. Crossing his arms in front of his face, Ryouga raced through the spray, droplets of caustic liquid sticking to his armor and burning through vulnerable spots.

Up ahead, he could see Cologne, her hands open, between stances.

He could guess that no one had ever charged into her black water attack. Unlike before, she didn't surround herself with it or use it as an all encompassing shield. The regular water, the lance and the shield, could be used for both offense and defense. The black water, now burning to the touch, could really only be used for offense. But he'd broken though! He had her!

Two attacks! It had to be two at the same time to be sure!

First: a breaking point beneath her. Cologne had kept a dry circle around her, to keep from touching the black water. Now, that little dry spot erupted, shooting razor sharp shards of stone and rock upwards. At the same time, Ryouga's fist descended like a hammer from above. He had caved in the engines of cars with his fist, so the blow probably wouldn't be enough to kill her, but it would stun her, and by the time he recovered, he'd have emptied his plasma pistol into her. He saw Cologne grit her teeth and start to pivot.

'Too late!'

They met.

And the next thing he knew, his fist slammed painfully into the ground.

'I missed? How?!'

There was no time to ponder it. Reversing his body's momentum he avoided Cologne's sweeping heel kick, and tried to counter with an inverted kick to her ankles. Instead of lifting her leg, the sole of her naked foot skidded along the uneven ground from the force of the blow, as she directed the force he had applied up, into a spin, and then into the same foot as it slammed into his side. It literally lifted him off the floor, and in the next second and a half, Cologne juggled him like a baton in close quarters combat.

The throat... The cervical curve of the spine… the flank, between the ribs and above the _ilium_ section of the pelvis... the celiac plexus, causing a spasm in the diaphragm and a white hot jolt of pain… Coughing blood onto the inside of his helmet HUD, one thought flickered across Ryouga's consciousness.

'What…?'

Any one of the blows would have killed a normal man on the spot, even with UNETCO personal armor. As it was, Ryouga stopped an abrupt plunge into the black water all around them with one hand. Almost immediately, he could feel the acid burning through his glove, and he pushed off with just the strength of that one arm, throwing himself through the air and onto one of the nearby terraces. Two seconds of hand to hand with Cologne, and he felt like he'd gone twenty rounds with Ranma… and lost, to boot.

Looking up, he saw her. Cologne stood where she had before, her long hair trailing through the air as she completed a lazy spin. Eyes half closed, Ryouga's mind – the mind of a martial artist – replayed what he had seen and felt. It hadn't been her hands or arms that had deflected his initial blow. It was almost too insane to believe, but it had to have been…!

Cologne's hair fell back down to her shoulders.

'Her hair…? She used her hair to deflect my blow?' Even for him, even after all he'd seen, it was impossible. **Impossible!** Catching the lip of a terrace as a streak of black water sliced into it, Ryouga flipped himself back to safety before he could fall into the black water below.

"How?" he had to ask.

"There is no part of my body that I cannot use as a weapon," Cologne cheerfully replied.

Then, she spread her fingers.

And the Sickening Water bubbled and rose, but not like before. This time, large droplets broke away, rising into the air. For the first time, she began to put some visible effort into a technique, opening her mouth to take a long deep breath. As one, the thousands of droplets burst, forming a burning acidic mist…

"Naturally, I call this my Sickening Haze," she continued, and smiled. "Are you certain you don't want to give up?"

"Absolutely not," Ryouga replied, reaching behind to the small stand issue tote attached to his upper back. With his right hand, he withdrew his plasma carbine. Switching off the helmet speakers with a precise jaw movement, he whispered one word.

"Now."

Cologne turned her head, just as the attack began. An explosion filled the air behind her, followed by the short crack-crack bark of plasma rifle rounds tearing through and evaporating condensed sheets of suspended water. Cologne moved in a flash as Ranma ran across the wall behind her, carbine at his shoulder, firing in controlled three round bursts. Like Ryouga, he had deduced that her defense had weakened when she shifted to use the Sickening Water. Both martial artists had come to the conclusion that they had to blitz her, hard and fast, before she overwhelmed either or both of them.

'We've got you now,' Ryouga thought to himself, as he tossed two grenades with one hand, and opened fire with the other. The air was already growing thick with clouds of misty poison, and it was taxing to push most of it out of his way with his battle aura. Ranma seemed to be fairing slightly better, having adapted a form of _hiryu shoten ha_ to blow the mist out of his way.

Cologne was no easy target, however. Not only was she fast, but she used splashes of water and other distractions to throw off their aim. The eye was naturally drawn to movement it could register, and it was hard to stay on target. Ryouga counted his shots as he tried to hit her, and allowed himself a savage grin as the grenades went off: one a frag grenade filling the air with supersonic shards of metal, and the other a diversionary flashbang. 180 decibels and one million candlepower, plus over a thousand metallic ball bearings, met inhuman martial artist.

Cologne emerged from the conflagration like a spinning discus of titian orange, her ethereal robes billowing through the air. Seemingly unharmed, having used her rotation and the alien properties of her new attire to shield herself, she swept up her arms and the mist around her rippled. A burst of it slammed into Ryouga through his telekinetic shield, overwhelming it. It was hardly a blow in the traditional sense, but it immediately splattered his helmet HUD and half his body with caustic acid.

Almost casually, she tossed two more waves his way as he fell, blind and burning.

Ranma, at least, managed to shield himself with a vortex of churning wind. Holding his left hand forward to generate the tiny tornado, his _hiryu kanshou_, he tried to get a bead on Cologne as he fired with his right. The plasma carbine bucked against his shoulder as he skidded down and into a pool of acidic water. Cologne ducked, avoiding two of the shots that had been center of mass, and swept her arms again as she spun. Ripple after ripple crashed into Ranma, pushing him back, and punching through his makeshift defenses.

"I can keep this up all day!" Cologne gleefully jeered, "But why draw things out?"

And then she turned, eyes moving just enough to look over her shoulder.

Ryouga stood, holding nothing less than an umbrella in front of him.

"Turning your back to me?" he asked, and slammed the tip of the strange alloy-gray umbrella into the ground. "I wouldn't do that if I were you!"

Standing right between the two men, Cologne didn't seem particularly worried.

"Ranma!" Ryouga yelled. "You better pull this off, 'cause I can only do this once!"

The lieutenant of India Squad then slammed his right palm into the umbrella, driving it deeper into the ground. Cologne immediately jumped just into the air, as an X emerged under her feet, the ground breaking and shooting up around her. At the same time, simultaneous breaking points explosions, ones Ryouga had left dormant and waiting to go off during the previous fight around the room, shot one-ton blocks of stone into the air.

That then exploded.

At the opposite end of the room, Ranma vanished as he stepped into the _umisenken_. Shielding herself within the radius of three of the breaking point explosions, Cologne could do little when the way of the silent thief brought him behind her. More than doing any damage to her, Ryouga had blown away the Sickening Mist, leaving her with only her fists to defend herself or attack others. With no other options, Cologne flew into action as she felt Ranma's presence, slapping aside his plasma carbine in one smooth movement. To her surprise, he let it go.

It was empty anyway.

With his left hand in a fist, Ranma unleashed a point black _hiryu hyou töppa_. It should have slammed right into her, but Cologne reacted instantly to the feint and trap. Gathering what spiraling hot _ki_ she could, she thrust her arm upwards, unleashing a traditional _hiryu shoten ha_ that deflected the Flying Dragon Ice Breakthrough attack. It was just as she focused her attention on Ranma, the two of them falling in midair, that she saw a blazing green light scream in from behind.

For once, she was unable to dodge to avoid it, and at over eleven kilometers per second, the plasma bolt buried into her lower back. It wasn't alone, either. Ranma was in front of her, and he hit like a truck. A blow to the face spun her around, and then the boy's arms blurred faster than the eye could follow.

"Dokuja Toshin Shou!"  
(Poisonous Serpent Spitting True Palm)

Hundreds of blows rained down on the nine principal weak spots of the human back and flank, landing before she even hit the ground with her feet, still standing. Ranma didn't let her alone, either. A garrote snaked around her neck, forming a deadly version of the _haizan tökai tai_, or High Mountain Fall-to-Sea Posture. Another bolt of plasma then tore into her chest as she stood, incapacitated, followed by a thunderous blow to the lower torso that left her bent over forward.

"You're finished, Cologne!" Ryouga snarled, and dug the stun rod deeper into her midsection, activating it and sending over two thousand volts coursing through her body. For a second, the three stood still, suspended as debris fell to the ground into muddy pools and rivulets.

"Finished…?" Cologne repeated, moving her left arm. Ryouga squeezed the trigger of the stun rod, shooting more electricity into her system.

Strangely, she didn't even twitch.

"**Finished**!?" she hissed, and as her face turned to look into his, Ryouga could see something… wrong, moving beneath the surface. A second later, Ranma flew off her back, twisting through the air, grunting in pain. It seemed impossible to believe at first, but coiling through the air in his wake were thin cords of green and brown; they were vines, slowly sprouting purple leaves... Ryouga glanced down, and saw the end of the stun rod wrapped in what looked like the petals of a flower.

'Is this,' he could only wonder, 'Wood style…?!

"How can I be finished?" Cologne asked, and she grabbed his wrist before he could jump back. He could see her skin splitting, revealing shades of red and green. Tiny tendrils, like roots, broke the surface of her fingers and wormed into the armor around his wrist. Before he could tear free, they were through soft spots in the personal armor, and burrowing into his flesh.

"How…" She smiled, and Ryouga screamed. "When I've barely even started?"

-----

Tatewaki Kuno snorted disdainfully at his so called opponent.

Said opponent snorted disdainfully back at him.

"Something bothering you, landling shit?" the young boy asked. He was exotic looking, with yellow-red eyes and hair that flowed and burned with fire. His upper body was bare except for the gloves over his hands, but he wore the titian robes of an ethereal pulled back around his waist and held in place with a loop of rope. A single small hand wrapped around the shaft of his unusual polearm weapon. Kuno had never seen the like before; it had no obvious cutting surfaces, and instead displayed a large ornamental circle as its head.

Kuno sighed openly and despairingly.

"To think that I, the great and noble Tatewaki Kuno, age 19, would have to debase himself by fighting a child," Kuno explained, turning his side to his four foot tall opponent. "It is to laugh."

Saffron narrowed his amber red eyes.

"Go home and play with a toy car or something," Kuno breezily added, making as if to walk away. He took all of one step before spinning, sword out and covering his left side. His feet skidded across the ground, footing lost as he struggled to stand upright. Finally, he crashed back first into a wall with a painful thud. Pinning him there like a fly, Saffron's child form still held the Kinjakan war staff with one hand. The circular head was glowing white hot, like molten steel.

"That staff," a voice came in from Command and Control. Nabiki. "Is emitting high energy microwaves. Don't let it touch you, Kuno-baby."

Saffron's childlike face parted as a grinned; it was a slasher smile full of teeth and long canines. Fire ran in rivulets down his long hair, and white and black wings beat restlessly in the air, sprouting from his shoulder blades. Kuno felt a sweat drop ease down his forehead. When Mousse had seen "Saffron-kun" he had promptly dismissed him as a threat and told Kuno to "take care of the little brat."

He could already feel the temperature begin to rise inside his armor.

With a heave, he pushed the child back a half step, allowing just enough room to side step and roll out from being pinned. Saffron's staff immediately whirled, slicing a line of yellow into the nearly indestructible alien alloy of the wall before slashing again with Kuno's sword. The Tenrai Hououken held, parrying the strike. There was surprising force behind the blow, only slightly less than Mousse could exert when they crossed blades.

"You're no normal little boy," Kuno stated the obvious.

"Figured that out by yourself, did you?" Saffron snapped back at the less than witty kendoist. He took a step forward, forcing Kuno's sword upward. The swordsman broke the lock, blocked a swipe from the side, and counterattacked low, aiming for Saffron's left leg. The boy blocked it, and he pushed Kuno back another step.

"Don't let this body fool you," Saffron gleefully explained, imagining the look of consternation on his opponent's face. "I have all the power of my adult self, had the last maturation ritual gone off as expected. And more!"

The pint sized Saffron's wings beat twice, angling the feathers forward.

"You're Japanese, aren't you?" the boy asked. "One of Ranma's stupid little friends? Well, any _friend_ of his is a _friend_ of mine! Enjoy… Kotei Kaen Yoki!"  
(Emperor's Blazing Wings)

Kuno was no fool, despite how he appeared. He'd been fighting some of the world's best martial artists for years, and he knew a special technique announcement when he heard one. Twisting his sword so the flat was against Saffron's staff weapon, he pushed hard and away. Given what Saffron had been doing with his wings, Kuno could guess that would be the source of the attack.

An instant later, blazing white and orange crescents erupted from Saffron's wings, filling the air in front of him with a hailstorm of burning, cutting, fury. Kuno gritted his teeth and focused mental energy into his arms, trust and faith in his sword absolute and unblemished in his mind. His arms became a blur as he blocked the burning scythes. His feet hit the ground and he took two steps back as he continued to parry the barrage.

Saffron looked on with growing irritation.

"Filthy little shit! Just die already!" He began to walk forward, wings continuing to fire wave after wave of bladed death. Tucking his Kinjakan across his chest, Saffron flattened the palm of his right hand. A glowing sphere of molten yellow expanded like a child's balloon, cracking with energy.

With a wordless snarl, Saffron filled the space in front of him with a lance of fire…

"Shin Kokuzan!"  
(True Sky Arc Decapitation)

Only to see that lance of fire crash into a wall of air and part down the middle in the face of Kuno's technique.

Saffron's youthful face contorted with an ugly sneer, his upper lip rising high enough to show sharp teeth. His wings flapped one behind him and straightened out. Narrow eyes surveyed his opponent. Kuno was surrounded by tiny fires, but unharmed. The swordsman held his sword out in front of him, as if to point at the boy.

"Very well!" Kuno roared. "I, Tatewaki Kuno, hereby find you a worthy opponent!"

Saffron's left eye twitched.

He held out his hand again, and summoned up another lance of flame, releasing it with a thunder-like rapport. Kuno's sword flashed in an upward stroke, distorting the air, and deflecting the beam of light. Saffron frowned and fired again. Kuno deflected it the same way, and then when he fired lower than before, the kendoist used a downward stroke to the same effect.

"How are you doing that?" The phoenix king asked, honestly perplexed. "How can you counter by blows without the Gekkaja, sister to this Kinjakan?"

Kuno laughed heartily at the question.

"My sword…." he replied, smirk evident in his tone of voice. "Is the heavenly blade of the phoenix! It slices through all the world's evils and defends all the world's good!"

Saffron rolled his eyes at the corny answer.

"Besides," Kuno added. "I have trained with fighters who throw far more attacks than you, and whose energy attacks are similarly powerful. I will not fall for such cheap parlor tricks!"

"Parlor tricks?" Saffron's smile grew wide and terrible once more. Craning his neck back and forth, the child hunched forward as two more wings erupted from his back, splaying out in a spray of gore. Slamming the blunt end of the Kinjakan into the ground, the weapon unleashed a deafening chime that seemed to shake the walls. Tendrils of flame lapped at the metal walls and ceiling, and trailed in Saffron's wake as he started to walk forward.

Kuno leveled his weapon.

"Come."

The fallen boy-king's wings beat as he rushed forward, Kinjakan and Hououken crashing against each other in a fountain of flame and sparks. Strike met strike, growing in speed and intensity. Flame bounced off the walls, forcing Kuno to deflect with his _kokuzan_ air pressure defense. A blow finally reached through Saffron's defenses, slicing open his arm… only to have the wound spout liquid fire and seal up in the span of a second.

Then the fight resumed, neither giving nor asking for quarter.

* * *

The thing Shampoo hated the most about fighting Ukyou was that it always went on and on and on. At least against Ranma or the like, she knew she'd be beaten quickly and life would go on. Given the fairly vast level of power (and skill) between them, she had basically accepted that as the way things were between them. It was the reason why he was her husband (by Amazon Law at least, like any other really mattered much).

Akane was the opposite: Shampoo knew she could crush the Tendo heir, if she really tried; the biggest obstacle was figuring out how to get away with it without Ranma or Ryouga finding out and turning her into a bloody smear on the floor. Still, Shampoo had her confidence when dealing with Akane, sure in the knowledge that if it came to a fight, she had it in the bag. Akane may have been her rival for Ranma's affections, but in martial arts? Never.

But Ukyou…

She was annoying. Even before this thing with the aliens, fights with the _okonomiyaki_ chef had been long, drawn out and inconclusive affairs. Even Kodachi or Miss Hinako either lost a fight or won it pretty much right off the bat, making things short and sweet. Ukyou, though, just didn't quit. She was Shampoo's match in too many ways.

She'd also gotten stronger. That much was probably obvious to everyone in their age group and more, and even Shampoo knew it. Still, it was coming as something of a surprise just how much she had improved, now that they were fighting for real. Her defense in particular was somewhat ridiculous and making the whole affair infuriatingly harder than it should have been.

Shampoo's arms in a blurring, scissor motion as she advanced on Ukyou, each strike parried with seemingly little effort by the mind controlled Japanese girl. Metal met metal in a chorus of bells and rings, and Shampoo snarled under her breath at her lack of progress. Ukyou ducked under a strike and Shampoo jumped over the attempted trip, and the momentum shifted back into reverse for the fifth time.

Ukyou's battle spatula spun in circles and spirals, blocking and striking at the same time and forcing Shampoo back, retracing her steps from just seconds before. Between trading attacks with their weapons, the two girls met with locked forearms and vicious kicks and knees. Both were, when it came down to it, brute force type fighters with an inclination towards pummeling an opponent into the dust. Ukyou's boot opened a new tear in Shampoo's already split lips, her left arm only partly cushioning the blow. In return, the chef suffered a similar elbow to her cheek.

"Hyoh!" Ukyou barked, thrusting with the reverse of her spatula. The end detached and narrowly missed Shampoo's head as the Chinese girl frantically dodged. Shampoo threw herself to the side, rolled, and avoided the counterweight as it slammed into the ground with an audible clang. Ukyou spun, protecting herself with a whirlwind of metal before stomping down with her knee, forcing Shampoo to again roll out of the way. A flurry of sword thrusts hit nothing, beaten off by the chef's nearly impenetrable defense.

Shampoo deflected a trio of mini-spatulas, but quickly found her weapon locked in place. "Wire!"

'Damn Mousse must've taught her that…'

Ukyou's next words were slurred, probably due to her trying to fight the control her body was under. She didn't need to say the words to announce what was coming, however. Shampoo saw the rising glow along the flat of her battle spatula and hastily released her _Dao_ saber, leaping out of the way before a flash of light engulfed the area around the trapped sword. Unlike her peers, Shampoo still preferred to use traditional Amazon weapons made from her sacred, and now lost, village.

The saber, twisted and bent, hit the ground. The hilt was burned away.

"Feh!" Shampoo tucked its sister blade away behind her and withdrew two meter long cylinders. "No choice, I guess…"

Squeezing the hilt, the ends of the sticks split and expanded forming the framework for a round ball. A half second later, the spaces between the ribs snapped into place. Spinning the high-tech _Chuí_ in her hands and getting a feel for their weight, Shampoo charged back into the fight.

Ukyou watched her with eyes full of righteous anger and indignation. She'd obviously moved on from helpless sorrow and self pity onto the recriminations phase. Shampoo wasn't heartless. She felt for Ukyou in the situation she was in. She had been used as a slave by Kiima, brainwashed into following orders and loving her master against her subconscious will. She understood the violation Ukyou was suffering now.

Shampoo tsk'ed at missing a chance to cave in the other girl's leg.

But she _did_ feel for Ukyou. It was why she had volunteered to fight her and get her out of the way. No one present could easily subdue her at this rate, and Konatsu had the best chances of holding off or beating Doctor Tofu. Maybe if Shampoo had risked taking that shot earlier, back on the scaffolding… but then Tofu had sensed her, even when she was in hiding listening in on his conversation. She could still feel inklings of his killing intention making her skin crawl.

If she had fired and missed, she knew without a doubt that he would have turned all of his attentions on her. She could well have ended up in Ukyou's situation alongside her, and then it would be three on one. Of course, these were all excuses for the fact that Tofu scared her and that she didn't want to fight him unless she was sure she could catch him by surprise.

A mini spatula buzzed by her ear, cutting off a few strands of hair.

'Damn…' Shampoo silently cursed. Like all Amazons, she took great pride in her hair; the longer the hair, the stronger the fighter, or so the tradition went. In fact, Ukyou's own hair was long and appropriate for her level of strength, too, though she kept it bundled into a mannish ponytail.

It galled Shampoo to admit it, but Ukyou was probably the better overall fighter between the two of them right now… thanks to her **whoring** herself out to get training from India Squad. Speed, technique, weapons, improvisation, maybe even experience: Ukyou had the edge now. Shampoo knew she still had strength and obscure martial arts techniques in her favor, but would that be enough?

It had been a long time since she fought a superior opponent with the knowledge that she absolutely had to win. Not since Kiima, back on Phoenix Mountain… and even then, Kiima hadn't been very serious about the fight. Could it really be that she hadn't been challenged since before her first humiliating fight with Ranma? It was definitely possible. She'd gotten terribly complacent and this was the result: surpassed by a crossdresser who didn't even act like a woman until two years ago.

'Pitiful.' Shampoo gritted her teeth at the bare miss that had almost clipped her head off like a flower. 'I won't lose. I won't lose!'

After all, there was still one other advantage she had…

Letting the blunt end of Ukyou's weapon plow into her abdomen, Shampoo jabbed her _Chuí_ into the girl's chest with one extended arm. Ukyou spun away from the contact, deflecting a follow up strike and then forcing them apart with a wide sweep of her weapon. Ukyou didn't seem to register pain in her current state with any obvious gestures, but Shampoo could see that the blow had knocked the wind out of her.

'She's feeling it…!' Shampoo thought with a bloody smile. Yes, their endurance was probably the same, but the Amazon girl still had _that_ edge.

**_Viciousness_** counted for something, too!

* * *

Mousse was starting to wish he'd traded places with Kuno.

His opponent hadn't said much since the fight has started, but Mousse knew his name. Of the missing martial artists UNETCO Intelligence had uncovered, he was considered one of the most dangerous. This man was the genius and traitor of the _Denkouken_ School, and the man who had mastered its highest techniques at the age of twelve. According to his remaining peers, he had gone into seclusion shortly afterwards, refusing to share the advances he made in the Art. At the age of sixteen, he had finally broken with the Dojo and made an attempt at living a normal life, forsaking martial arts completely.

Mister Ayabe stood in front of Mousse now, his hands at his sides, barely visible under his Ethereal's cloak. He was bald, but rather than suffering from a receding hairline, the skin on the top of his head seemed to be pale and paper-like. The face was unremarkable, save for his eyes. They too were pale, the pupils crackling with blue-violet lightning. From the first few tentative attacks Mousse had made, Ayabe seemed quite fast on his feet.

But then, he was using _that_ trick, too.

Mousse licked his lips, and held out his arms, assuming a crane style kung fu stance. "You seem to be taking me lightly."

Ayabe slowly shook his head, but didn't move from his casual stance.

"It isn't that," he replied, voice serious. "Your forces are attacking. When on the defensive against many foes, it is best not to exert yourself on any one of them."

"Well then, let's see if I can make you sweat a little!" Mousse replied. He still had his firearms hidden on his person, and he had no qualms about using them in a fight against an alien-controlled martial artist (or any martial artist, really). All he needed was the right moment. Hastily taking the weapon out and firing would provoke an immediate response, and there was little chance of getting a bead on an enemy of this caliber without the element of surprise. Acting rashly could leave you with a ruined or lost firearm, all for no gain.

Ayabe's fingers flexed, and this time Mousse saw him move.

He let himself appear to be distracted by the flash of light. Without the distraction, Ayabe was fast, but not nearly as fast as he appeared to be. Mousse had trained against the _Yamasenken's_ similar distraction techniques, and he had learned to use his blindness to his advantage. By averting his eyes and only observing his opponent in the corner of his vision, he could avoid the initial disorienting flash. For someone who had learned to fight despite their handicap, it wasn't difficult at all.

Mousse's body flowed away from the incoming strike, bending easily like rubber. His right leg shot up while his torso bent down, executing a smooth _dachou kyaku_ (Ostrich Leg) aimed at the critical nerve clusters along the neck and face. The vertical kick itself wasn't that special; it was the poison coated blades that popped out of his boots at various angles that added the bite to the technique.

Ayabe wouldn't be so easily dispatched, however, and in tribute to his experience with the Art, he shifted his arm the moment he saw Mousse's movement. Accurately reading the counterattack, he batted aside the strike just below the knee. He then flowed easily into another strike, crouching as he adjusted for Mousse's currently low center of gravity. The Chinese martial artist blocked with the side of his other foot, balancing on his right hand instead, and then flattened and twisted at the ankle to try and stab his enemy with a suddenly extending needle that emerged from his heel.

Around they went, Mousse shifting from his feet to his hands, blocking and striking with Ayabe in a zig zag pattern across the room. A few more times, Ayabe tried to use his flash-disappearance trick, the one that made it almost look like he had teleported some distance, and every time, Mousse nearly caught him in a counterattack. Despite how well timed he made his attacks, however, he couldn't seem to hit the man with any of his concealed poisoned blades or traps.

Finally, they broke apart: Mousse back flipped away to rethink his strategy.

"You have a very unique fighting style," Ayabe said, craning his neck. There was a sober expression on his face. "Not like Cologne's at all."

"You know about me then?" Mousse asked, buying some time to think.

Ayabe nodded. "Yes, Cologne told us about most of you. Not the girls, though. You use Hidden Weapons, obviously. That's unfortunate."

"Unfortunate? Why?"

The older man blinked a few times.

"Well," he finally decided to answer. "You use an awful lot of metal under those robes. Most people can't see it, because you use your _ki_ to mask its mass. Which is to say: you freely shift objects in and out of your battle aura, in addition to using conventional Hidden Weapons and mechanical traps. Most people can't predict what weapon you will use until it emerges."

Mousse was silently shocked by the understanding this man had for his style. Hidden Weapons was not a _Joketsuzoku_ or Amazon style of combat. Mousse had learned it in his travels around China, and then taken it to a new level. Even his peers didn't fully understand the tricks of his trade. He always supposed that Cologne knew, but this man spoke as if he had more than just knowledge of how it worked.

"You aren't a good match for me," Ayabe concluded. "I can perceive your hidden attacks before they fully materialize."

"Impossible!" Mousse scoffed. If that was true… "Are you saying you can see the future?"

"Not quite."

Mousse narrowed his eyes in sudden alarm, running back what he's just heard. His opponent couldn't see the future, which was certainly good, but what did he mean perceive. Then the Chinese fighter remembered what Ayabe had said before. 'That's unfortunate… you use an awful lot of metal under those robes… You aren't a good match for me…'

"So that's it then," Mousse said, nodding to himself. Somehow, this man had an extrasensory perception when it came to metallic objects. "That's how it is."

"And yet, you've somehow managed to see through my Hiraishin Aisatsu Sen (Lightning Rod Salutation Flash)," Ayabe added, referring to his sleight of hand trick. "That's interesting. Were you fighting me with your eyes closed?"

"Not quite," Mousse threw back Ayabe's earlier obtuse reply.

"Hm," the older man mused. "It seems I'll have to exert myself after all. I need to beat you and check in on Saffron-kun…"

"Don't count me out just because you can read some of my attacks!" Mousse stood straight and ducked his hands into his sleeves. "I am a master of hidden weapons. You can't evade me forever."

"Denkouken Hidden Art," Ayabe announced, invisible energy flooding his body and crackling along the pores in his skin. "Kaminari!"

Ayabe suddenly took off in a burst of speed, no longer relying on his Salutation Flash technique. Mousses' eyes widened at the sudden increase in baseline speed, and his sleeves flung wide open. The best way to meet a charge was with another charge: that way the fastest attack had the advantage of speed, as both targets shot towards each other. Mousse's _Karasu Sansai Ha_ (Raven Storm Wave) exploded from around his hands: a barrage of no less than a thousand flechette darts each fired with enough force to penetrate a man wearing two Kevlar vests.

The _denkouken_ master skidded along the ground and held both hands out in front of him, meeting the attack headlong. Arcs of electricity crackled between his fingers, and an almost visible pulse of circular force scattered the rain of needles. Bounding off the ceiling, backing away from his charging opponent, Mousse's fingers flexed. A stream of bladed chains and spinning _kusarigama_ knives fired out of his sleeves. This time, Ayabe did make some move to avoid the projectiles, jinking sharply to the side in addition to using his reflection technique.

'The knives were reflected through their metal blades, not the wooden shafts.' Mousse observed, even as he attacked. 'It may also be limited by mass. That would explain blocking so many low-mass needles, but only two of the higher mass kusarigama… Now, for the speed…'

The martial artist's thick glasses glinted in a sinister fashion, as two nine millimeter Mk 23 SOCOM semi-automatics popped out of his sleeves and into his hands. He backpedaled as he fired, firearms coughing up bullet after bullet. However, the moment the guns came out, no: a moment before even, Ayabe had his palms facing downward towards the floor. This time, he did disappear in a flash.

'Fast!" Mousse thought as he tried to track his enemy's movement. 'Damn fast!'

Ayabe bounced from one wall to the next all down the corridor, repelling himself away from the metal walls. By the time Mousse had discharged nine shots from each handgun, the two found themselves alongside the alien Elerium 115 reservoir. The valuable material was in safe storage, of course, but a handful of humming reactors worked behind a shielding wall nearby, and various control surfaces projected from the walls and floor of the large room.

'Ten, eleven, twelve…' Mousse dropped the handguns, knowing he wouldn't have time to reload. Instead, two long _Pudao_ spears shot out of his sleeves in an attempt to intercept the charging Trenchard. Ayabe swatted the offending instruments aside and got inside Mousse's guard. Tiger claws appeared in Mousse's hands as he tried to parry the first strike (and shred anything he could get in his palms). Ayabe deflected the parries at the wrist, and struck with his elbow, knocking Mousse off his feet.

The weapon master flicked a live grenade out of his sleeve, but Ayabe kicked it into the air before it could detonate. His speed was incredible already, but the ability to see what Mousse was doing next made it even worse. He did have some non-metallic weapons, of course, but they were few in number and third rate at best.

'In retrospect, maybe I should've invested a bit more in plastics…' the thought bitterly crossed Mousse's mind as he tried to work with what he had. He blocked two blows as he stumbled away, but quickly found himself outmaneuvered. Forced into using his left arm to block a rising knee, he caught a solid blow to the chest and went airborne. Skidding across the floor he eventually slammed back first into a strange alien orb rising out of the floor.

"Hiraishin Kaizai Satsu." (Lightning Rod Intervention Murder) "This is the end," Ayabe explained, raising one hand to eye level. The metal studs bored into flesh and bone shone in the eerie green light of nearby alien consoles. "Close your eyes and accept death."

Mousse shook his head and slowly got to his feet.

His opponent cocked his head in surprise.

"That attack should have stopped your heart," Ayabe groused, watching on with undisguised curiosity. "I could have killed an elephant with that blow. Was it your armor, or…?"

Now standing, Mousse's right hand trailed the singed mark on his robe, right over his heart. His left arm hung at his side as bits and pieces of unidentified fibrous material fell out of his sleeve. Rolling his hands around and flexing his fingers, Mousse suddenly had eight _Piau_ (Chinese throwing knives) nestled between his fingers. Crossing his arms in front of him, he adopted a slightly wider stance.

"Now I see," Ayabe stated, his eyes tightening as his battle aura flared up around him. He was not particularly flashy, looking for all intents and purposes like wisps of steam rising from under his ethereal robes.

"You were able to shift that insulating ceramic material under your robes. Is this some sort of Hidden Weapons defense? I never imagined I'd meet someone who could nullify my Hiraishin Kaizai Satsu. Cologne spoke of you too lightly!"

Ayabe smiled and took off in another flash of combined foot speed and magnetic force. Mousse leapt back, throwing two of the _Piau_ with finger strength alone. The throwing knives left his hand, and a moment later, took along with them a pair of attached grenades, tied to the knives with wire. Flipping through the air, Mousse's two empty fingers curled in, pulling back hidden wires and setting off the grenades.

Fire and mach speed shrapnel filled the air.

'There!' Mousse saw the flash of movement, and fired another duo of explosive-paired knives. Ayabe flash stepped again, using his unique form of rapid movement.

'Up!' the Chinese fighter guessed. Unlike Ranma, Ayabe never seemed to use kicks to deliver serious blows, perhaps because the _denkouken_ required them for proper grounding. That, combined with his extremely fast but linear movement, made him predictable to some extent. What was hard was interrupting his movement or stopping him before he could deliver a killing blow.

Mousse released four more matched _Piau_, as well as a flurry of needles from his sleeves. As expected, Ayabe deftly avoided the explosions, spinning like a top and magnetically redirecting the needles. He shot off another wall, heading towards Mousse's position. The Chinese weapon master jumped, another pair of grenades falling out of the hem of his robes by his feet. Ayabe twirled right before he landed, sending the two grenades flying away moments before exploding. He then stomped his foot, sending out an electrical pulse that disabled the hidden mine Mousse had covertly set and hidden on the floor.

'He's good. He's incredibly good.' Mousse held out his hands. 'I'll have to use _that_ technique.'

Ayabe tracked Mousse with his eyes, ready to speed blitz him.

"Ikkatsu Kakudo Hou!"  
(Enraged Male Phoenix Roar)

For a second, nothing happened.

Then Mousse snapped his fingers and a tremendous conflagration engulfed the room in front of him. A shockwave of displaced air nearly bowled him over, instead, loitering in midair it simply pushed him further back and away from the blast. The fire burned white hot but only for an instant in time. The true power of the attack had been explosive, sending out 2.5 kilometer per second superheated overpressure waves that annihilated anything in their path. A moment later, the atmospheric pressure reversed, and a blast of air rushed back into the center of the attack, forcing Mousse to land and secure his footing.

Breathing heavily, he inspected his singed robes.

The _Ikkatsu Kakudo Hou_ was his most deadly attack by far, but it was extremely taxing. He not only had to have perfect control over his mass manipulating battle aura, but it required a substantial percentage of his _ki_ reserves to retrieve the fine dust-like thermobaric material he used from its containment case and release it in the proper amounts. The tiny size of the particles ironically made them harder to visualize, and thus control.

Once mixed into the air with oxygen, however, all that was required was a small spark – the snap of his gloved fingers, with special pads attached – to ignite the nearly invisible particulate cloud. Mousse was proud of the fact that his Phoenix Roar likely surpassed all but the ultimate attacks of Saffron himself, burning at around 2000 degrees Celsius. Combined with the incredible blast wave, the miniature fuel air explosive could clear a room of all organic life in seconds.

"An incredible attack. Superb execution."

Mousse followed the sound of the voice up, towards the ceiling.

"What…?"

Koichi Ayabe crouched upside down from the flat surface of the ceiling, his own robes still trailing smoke. Slowly, the man stood, still upside down, still in defiance of gravity. He was singed, yes, and a normal human would have been in agony from the burns, but his alien enhanced constitution and clothes had helped to protect him. Worse, his somehow being able to stick to the ceiling had allowed him to avoid the majority of the _Ikkatsu Kakudo Hou_.

"This isn't possible…" Mousse tried to figure out just how this man was doing what he did. There didn't appear to be any clinging surfaces on the ceiling, there was nothing to get even the slightest foothold on, and Ayabe didn't have any claws on his feet or the like.

"What the Hell?" Mousse snarled. "You get bit by a radioactive spider or something?"

Ayabe actually smiled amiably at the remark.

"I believe they call it _van der Waals_ forces."

Mousse frowned up at the man, though he knew Ayabe couldn't see his face.

"What: like a gecko?"

The inhuman martial artist nodded and reached up to his forehead with his right hand. Digging his fingernails into a patch of flesh there, he slowly tore the skin away. A trickle of blood ran down his now hairless skull. Mousse winced at the disgusting display, but then stared at what had been revealed. Using the zoom feature in his helmet HUD, he could see it clearly: Ayabe had exposed something buried into his forehead.

"This is my Third Eye," the man explained, pointing at the bloody metal. "It is one of seven, at each of my principal chakra points. This particular one is 'Command.'"

"The Ajna chakra point…" Mousse guessed. "Is this really the _denkouken_? I've never heard of anything like this before."

"This style of combat belongs only to me. My old senseis demanded I teach them the secret techniques I developed, but then, when they realized the toll it could take and that it was too much for their bodies to handle, they brainwashed children into undergoing the same procedure."

Ayabe's eyes narrowed, as the old memory still brought anger to the surface.

"As you can guess, not a single one was able to reach these heights. All were crippled for life. The Dojo was disgraced, and quickly tried to cover up its crimes. I left in disgust and sealed up my techniques, vowing never to use them again… even in self defense." He paused. "And now… here I am. Using them again. How disgusting."

He partially hid his face behind his right hand.

"To have unsealed _Hotaru_ (Firefly) after all this time…"

"You're like Tetsuya," Mousse interrupted, referring to Ryouga's father. "They're forcing you to do this. Can't you fight it?"

"Things don't work that way."

Ayabe detached from the ceiling and fell gracefully to the floor. Opening his mouth, a misty fog billowed out from between his jaws, crackling with electricity. Even through his armor, Mousse could feel the air charge with static electricity. Intermittent flashes of lightning crackled in the air around the Trenchard, bending and warping to his will. There was no oppression or killing intention to his aura, only a sense of growing elemental power. It was like an explosion in slow motion.

"I can't stop myself any more," Ayabe said with growing strain. "Give up before I kill you. Cologne won't turn you away after seeing what you can do."

Mousse shook his head.

"Can't do that." He took up a defensive stance. "I didn't want to do this, but… you've forced me! Saotome Style!"

Ayabe quirked an eyebrow.

Saotome Style?

"**Secret Technique!**" Mousse yelled, voice burning with passion. He gathered his energy, focused it…

And then turned around and took off like a bat out of Hell.

…Literally leaving a faint dust cloud in his wake. For all of a second Koichi Ayabe stood motionless, totally stunned by that most powerful technique of the incomparable Saotome Style _Musabetsu Kakuto Ryu_. Then he realized that his opponent had just run away. And shamelessly, too!

Huffing in annoyance, the middle aged man gave chase.

* * *


	87. The Big Show VII

"Hey, guys, this is Mousse. I, ah… could use a little _help_ here."

"Love to help and all, but I kinda just got stabbed by a giant spatula. Fuck."

"While I would not deign to ask for assistance, I can not seem to actually kill my opponent. His wounds heal with the persistence of the mythical hydra."

"Ryouga!" Nabiki's voice, more than any of the others, sounded panicked and afraid. It was ironic. She was the safest of them all. "Ryouga, what's wrong? What happened?! Ryu's got a punctured lung, its stable but… but your vitals are all over the place!"

He squinted his eyes shut.

God, she could be loud sometimes.

"Mousse and Kuno aren't nearly as badly hurt! I'll reroute…"

"No," he cut her off.

Ryouga clutched his arm, barely able to concentrate through the fog of agony stitching through his body. He could feel it moving inside his arm, worming through his flesh; burrowing and spreading. Desperate, frantic, he forced more and more of his battle aura to try and repulse or burn away the infection. It only seemed to make it worse. Heating up his left hand and holding his right arm, he tried to scald it away but only ended up burning himself.

"Nabiki…" he managed to say. "Make sure… the others get help…"

Girlish laughter, Cologne's, mocking and haughty, filled his ears.

"Are you sure?" Nabiki asked.

"Those are my… orders," he forced the words out despite the creeping pestilence working its way up his arm. He barely heard her muted acknowledgment.

"You poor boys," Cologne's voice said from somewhere nearby. "I **am** sorry I had to use that technique on you, but things were getting a little dangerous back there. I acted without thinking."

"What… did you do to us?" Ryouga managed to yell. He reached for one of his bandannas, and tried to seal it into a band of Iron Cloth. If he had to, he'd cut off his arm to save the rest of his body… except he couldn't seem to mould the _ki_ properly. The bandanna straightened, twisted, and reverted back into cloth.

He saw Cologne standing over him.

She reached down to grip his helmet, appearing to look for how to remove it. The beautiful Amazon cocked her head to the left, staring at him with large brown eyes. Dark black hair cascaded over her shoulders and partly obscured her face. Then one of her hands snaked down his body and painfully grabbed onto his right arm.

"This," she said, giving the arm a little squeeze. "Is mine, now. Most Joketsuzoku consider the Wood element to be medicinal, but there are _so many more_ applications. The parasitic vine inside you will destabilize and devour your ki, using it to spread through your body. Left unchecked, it will then start a flowering phase. By the time those flowers bloom, there won't even be a skeleton left."

Ryouga's upper lip twitched in a sneer.

"But don't worry," Cologne added, smiling reassuringly. "I want the two of you alive…. So I'll only let it _eat your arms and legs_."

Cologne stood back up, shoulders shaking as she laughed.

* * *

"Amekiri Kokuzan!"  
(Rain Cutter Sky Arc Decapitation)

Saffron howled in anger and pain as a web of slashes and cuts broke out across his upper body, from his face to his shoulders to his waist. The tiny air pressure cuts burned with an inner fire, and the phoenix boy-king managed to block a downward slash aimed at his _Saka Gesa_ point (right shoulder). Almost instantly, the inch deep cuts began to fill with burning flesh, healing in seconds. Kuno stepped into his opponent's guard and hammered him with the blunt hilt of his sword, driving Saffron back a half dozen feet.

Inside his armor, Kuno was breathing in ragged gasps. Despite his sure tone a moment ago to his comrades in arms, he was secretly somewhat worried. His armor had sustained several serious breaches where the innermost layer had solidified to try and preserve NBC (nuclear/biological/chemical) containment, and he already had first degree burns across at least a tenth of his body, and a few second degree burns where he'd been hit by the enemy's strange weapon.

His implacable fighting spirit was starting to, well, _flag_ somewhat as well.

Which was to say: he was tired and it was starting to show.

Saffron chuckled darkly as the patchwork of slices across his face healed up. In contrast to Kuno's less than perfect state, the boy seemed completely none the worse for wear. His two pairs of wings flapped behind him, lifting him off his feet. Kuno could guess what would come next. Just as expected, Saffron detached the head of his fighting staff, the Kinjakan. The blazing circlet shot through the air, moving like a UFO: in erratic, insect like zigzags.

Kuno managed to block the first strike in time, and bring his sword around to block the next as it came in from the other side. The weapon snaked away, shooting off in a seemingly random direction, nicking the ceiling in a spray of sparks before twisting around and buzzing by Kuno's head. Abruptly it swooped in low, and the kendoist planted his sword into the floor, deflecting it.

Unfortunately, pulling his weapon loose left him exposed, and the Kinjakan shot in from the side, slashing across the his back. Kuno grimaced in pain, but held his sword out in time to deflect a blow that would have otherwise removed his noble head from his noble person. The weapon finally looped around in the air and returned to its owner, still vibrating and spewing white flame, even as it reattached to the body of Saffron's war staff.

"You don't look so good, landling shit."

Kuno was struggling to stand. The pain across his back made holding any sword fighting stance into pure agony. Steadying himself with his sword for a moment, he held it out in front of him, ready to continue.

"You're starting to bore me," Saffron elaborated, sounding petulant. "All you do is the same thing with your sword. Don't you have any elemental or ki attacks?"

"My sword is all I need," Kuno finally replied. "Cowardly attacks like yours sicken me."

"How dull you are." Saffron's golden eyes gleamed with vicious delight. "I suppose I'll finish you off then. There's no point in keeping around a toy that has lost its novelty."

Kuno set his feet, and activated the hidden trigger in his sword.

"Try it."

With a hiss, the blade reformed, to flattening and lengthening from 66 to 99 centimeters. As the metal shifted, a second blood groove, this one on the left side, began to form, as the curve of the katana became more of a straight edge. This was the second "phase" of his sword, in addition to its default bokken and phase-one katana forms. Kuno had asked for the design to be based on Ganryu Kojiro's famous sword Monohoshi Zao. The transformation itself took only a second and a half to complete and solidify, and he took the opportunity to take up a special stance.

Almost twenty meters in front of him, Saffron was building up energy for what had to be a titanic attack far larger than any of his previous fireballs. Kuno was well aware of his weakness at range, as well as the fact that he was the slowest man in India Squad on his feet. He didn't have a 'speed step' type move like many of the others, and while his arm speed was very good, his general _Taihenjutsu_ (body movement) skills were mediocre. This was a fact that his peers had pointed out to him, and that Ryouga and the others in India Squad had made sure he developed a counter for.

Given the distance between them, Saffron had to be confident he could attack before Kuno could strike him. The swordsman took two steps, arcing his sword across his body to build momentum and concentrate his fighting spirit. He could feel his _jouki_, his _passionate ki_, burning along his synapses and down into the muscles of his arms and legs. He could manage this perhaps once. It was the one and only charge he knew that deserved a name.

"Be grateful, landling scum… Few get a taste of my true power!" Saffron held a burning orb of fire between his hands.

Kuno struck. "Sokushi Tenrai!"  
(Instant Death Heavenly Thunder)

His sword howled, the cry of its _tachikaze_ the sound of ripping paper ending in a clap of thunder. The kendoist crossed the space of eighteen meters in less than a tenth of a second. Even he couldn't really perceive things at that speed, and the next thing he knew he was flying face first into the ground, rolling and skidding along it completely out of control. Bracing himself with his shoulder, Kuno slid along the floor, only stopped when he plowed gracelessly into an empty alien storage cylinder.

Really: it wasn't accurate to call the _Sokushi Tenrai_ a charge in the proper sense. In truth, it was a _thrust_. Kuno had known for years how to strike with his sword so swiftly that he could shatter stone with the air pressure from his bokken. It had been his one and only trademark attack until Ranma had shown up and promptly beaten it. _Sokushi Tenrai_ took all the force he put into those strikes and accumulated it into a single lunge, surging forward with all his strength and fighting spirit without hesitation; taking the rest of his body along for the ride. It only worked in a straight line, and only a limited distance before he completely lost control. But still…

Kuno's shaking hand still held onto his beloved blade.

"Did you hear it?" he asked, using the sword to steady himself.

Saffron stood in the middle of the room, belching fire from his side, his arms flailing in the air. The upper half of his torso seemed to be hanging onto the lower half by a thread.

"Did you hear my sword's roar?" Kuno yelled, stalking towards the phoenix king. "My Heavenly Thunder cuts through all the world's evil!"

Sinews of fire uncoiled like entrails from Saffron's split midsection. He had literally been cut in half, and even two pairs of his wings had been torn free. However, rather than spill his insides into the floor of the alien lab, the viscera seemed to take on a life of its own. Like snakes, pieces wound together and matched up with similar coils rising from his lower body.

"Ah. Ha Ha HA!" Saffron's head lolled limply to the side, his tongue sticking out and trailing drool. "Was that your _trump card_?"

Mad laughter filled the room as new wings erupted out of Saffron's back, replacing the ones that had been damaged, even before the two halves of his body fully attached. A blast of green plasma splattered his left arm and blew off part of his shoulder, and another raked his face, but not before another tendril of fire shot out of the boy's hand and blew the plasma pistol out of Kuno's hand.

The swordsman fell back, his right hand numb with pain.

"Slice me apart. Cut open my belly. Bathe me in star fire…!" Saffron gleefully remarked, half his face reforming even as he pushed the words past plasma scarred tissue. "You can not kill me. I am the phoenix! I am immortal!"

Kuno sucked in his breath as his armor automatically administered a shot of pain killer. The situation was looking somewhat… grim. In moments, Saffron was whole once more, casually working the kinks out of his new jaw. He took a step towards his weakened prey and held up his hand. A ragged ball of fire winked into existence in his palm.

"I'm going to start with your legs, landling…" Saffron's amber eyes promised pain first, death a distant second. "And work my way up from there."

-----

"Kansatsuken, was it?"

Doctor Tofu held the tip of Konatsu's sword in place with two fingers, stopping it from driving into his exposed left side. The legendary male kunoichi was breathing heavily, his battle aura blazing around him as he tried to force the weapon forward. Tofu's arm strained slightly to keep him at bay before the still robes Trenchard pivoted and pushed the blade away and into the air.

Konatsu bounced back a step.

"Not bad for a sword technique. But it is pointless trying to fool my eyes with an illusion. Did you really expect that I would misjudge the length of the sword so easily?"

Tofu scoffed at the very idea.

"Weren't you going to kill me?" he then asked with a small smile. "And free my little Betty?"

"Her name is Ukyou!" Konatsu snapped, voice tense and angry and frustrated.

"No. It isn't." Tofu's hollow eyes darkened with malice. "Not while I pull her strings."

Abruptly, Tofu spun around, hand slapping aside a dozen thrown shuriken. Another Konatsu rushed in from behind wielding twin _tessen_ (iron fans). Tofu intercepted the first strike and hit a series of pressure points along the arm. The body vanished literally in Tofu's grip, replaced by yet another grenade-replacement _kawarimi_. The doctor reacted swiftly, grabbing the device and inserting his _ki_ into it, deactivating the firing mechanism.

Konatsu was proving to be quite capable when properly motivated. His ability to use replacement techniques with multiple telekinetically controlled 'illusion' bodies was something Tofu hadn't expected. The speed with which he could use the technique made it a useful escape from pressure point strikes. His _tonpou_ (Art of Escape) was very highly developed indeed.

It was then that Tofu felt it.

There were cuts on his palm, and tiny serrations on the live grenade.

Poison!

"How ironic…"

Tofu well remembered using a similar trick on Happosai, a man he had no inclination to fight fairly. That time, he had used something that he knew the lecherous old man couldn't resist: a frilly black bra that Cologne had picked out. She'd even worn it for a few days to properly suffuse it with feminine _ki_. Happosai had grabbed it without thinking and ended up poisoned as a result. Now, Konatsu had pulled a similar trick on him.

"Füjin Seikyü Senpu!"  
(Heartless Bill Whirlwind)

"Senpu Kazekan!"  
(Whirlwind Multiplication)

"Tachikiru Hitokage!"  
(Severing Shadow)

Three voices: three techniques, one for each of Konatsu's clone bodies. Being able to perform three separate techniques at the same time was impressive multitasking. Tofu divided his own attention between isolating and analyzing the poison slowly creeping through his corpse-like hybrid body and examining this new combination technique he found himself in. He'd seen the Heartless Bill Whirlwind before but this was…

Different.

Konatsu had multiplied the whirlwind, thickening the flurry of swirling paper into a virtual tornado. The third technique then plunged the world into darkness. Luckily, he no longer relied on visual cues, so he didn't feel particularly worried by the turn of events. A moment later, a chain snaked around his upper arms, and a blade cut deep into his left and right forearms. The blades pushed his arms together until they were impaled a second time and locked together.

So: that was it.

_Tachikiru Hitokage_ wasn't a blinding technique, so much as a technique that blocked sensory input. Even a sense of pain or pressure on his impaled limbs was absent. He had neither heard nor seen nor anticipated the attack with his _sakkijutsu_. It was an effective combo. Tofu could hardly imagine the enemy it wouldn't have ended up defeating. A blade slid into his back, severing the spinal cord.

"Pin my arms together and sever my spine," Tofu said, betraying not a hint of dismay at the situation. "_Is that it_?"

Through the contact points - the three blades impaling him – Tofu could read where his targets were. Twisting his pinned arms and purposefully dislocating part of his left arm, he seized something soft in the fingers of his right hand. It felt like, and it was, a skull. Tofu dug his fingers into the eye sockets and immediately yanked his arm back, driving the elbow of his right arm into the throat of another invisible attacker. At the same time, he lifted one foot and kicked back and down, twisting the third attacker's hamstrings.

He spun, breaking one of the Konatsu bodies at the neck and hitting the second with a kick that had the same effect. The Severing Shadow began to break up, and Tofu immediately turned on the third Konatsu and struck with his foot: using his heel, then his toes to hit a series of pressure points along the ninja's side. A moment before the last one could register, Konatsu literally jumped out of his own body, leaving his black ninja garb to hang on Tofu's outstretched leg.

"I'm amazed you got that replacement up in time," Doctor Tofu Ono admitted, with some genuine appreciation. The two 'dead' Konatsu's vanished, revealing makeshift replacements bade out of used weapons and bundles of straw and wire. The remaining 'kunoichi' staggered and coughed, hastily flipping up part of his helmet to hack a wad of blood onto the ground.

Tofu nonchalantly tore his arms apart from one another, leaving a sword buried in each. They were only nuisances. He then reached behind, to his back, and popped out the sword that had stuck out there. Dropping the weapon, he leisurely started pulling the swords out of his arms.

"A fine attempt, but you made a mistake," Tofu lectured, cracking his knuckles as he turned to face Konatsu. "I no longer have what could be called a 'human body.' The limitations of flesh and blood no longer apply to me. Severing my spine is no worse than cutting my nails. In addition, I can selectively activate my own vital points, achieving any affect I desire, at any time I desire."

Konatsu balled his fists, but grimaced as an involuntary shiver ran down his arms.

"That fear you're feeling… that rising sense of terror, is due to my manipulation of your amygdala." Tofu softly chortled. "I know the feeling, because I've used all my techniques before… on myself. I couldn't reach the pressure point normally, so I bounced it off of two others. I'm glad it seems to be working."

The young ninja was already on the floor, kicking wildly and screaming, shaking his head hard enough to slam his helmet against the floor. His arms flailed, sporadically throwing shuriken and then even a small hidden sword, randomly into the air. Tofu clucked his tongue as he watched, pits for eyes observing with heartless inquisition.

"Your arms should be going numb now." Tofu's expression wavered, as something unusual occurred. "Your muscle tension is less than expected. Heart rate… wait, that can't be right…"

Without preamble, Konatsu flipped back onto his feet.

"This isn't…!" Tofu pivoted, watching with shock as a wall seemed to move behind him. But it wasn't a wall. It was one of the landed UFOs in the base garage: a medium scout. It was moving; skidding and scraping along the ground. Then the almost twenty-meter wide square shaped ship upended like a capsizing boat. Backpedaling madly, Tofu just managed to leap out of the way and land on another landed UFO.

The scout crashed to the ground, bowling end over end.

"Huh!" a deep voice growled. "I missed!"

-----

Mousse paused to catch his breath, catching sight of the new arrival.

"About damn time," the hidden weapons master grunted.

A curved, single edged sword unsheathed with an audible click.

-----

"Burn!" Saffron roared, aiming to bring one last great fireball down on his beaten opponent. His fingers twitched. "…eh?"

And the tips of said fingers fell off.

…Followed by phalanges, then the metacarpals, then the palm at the wrist and then the arm at the elbow. Piece after piece fell to the floor with a wet splat, burning away the moment it was severed from the main body. Uncontrolled after the loss of the hand holding it, Saffron's fireball lost cohesion and dissipated into the air.

A haughty tone of voice: "You're making us look bad, Saffron."

Followed by a familiar one: "Lord Saffron!"

-----

Cologne's hand moved with almost imperceptible speed. Something small and fast crashed into it, blowing away bits and pieces of cushioning plant material and sending out a small shockwave strong enough to shake the leaves from the nearby alien plant life. The woman in ethereal robes sneered in the direction of the attack, looking down past the crinkled _wooden staff_ in her hand towards an all too familiar face.

Brown inhuman eyes burned with hate.

"You…!"

------

Asura shook her center head to clear the cobwebs in her collective mind. That accursed spatula wielding girl had knocked her out, and in a particularly humiliating way. Not for the first time, she cursed the weak mortal shell she had to inhabit. If only someone like that Amazon with the purple hair had fallen into the pool in Jyusenkyou. She would have made a worthy host indeed! Long buried and sealed away, what was left of the village girl named Rouge could barely speak up to defend herself.

"Burn them both!" the right head hissed.

"Electrocute them!" the left insisted.

"Why fight?" The center mediated, as usual. "We can do both!"

Getting on her knees, Asura began to channel power into her body, when she noticed something trailing up her leg. It looked like a vine, with a little man-shaped pear or fruit or something on it. It didn't seem to be one of Cologne's plants, and even if it was, that wouldn't explain what it was doing here. Gripping it with one hand, her attentions already otherwise occupied, Asura's ears were suddenly assaulted by an ultrasonic shriek.

The sound would have killed most normal humans; as it was, it sent the still weakened Asura into a convulsive fit. After a few agonizingly long seconds, she slipped back into unconsciousness. Two pairs of boots approached the subdued demon-girl, one with a green band around the ankles and one with pink. The footwear belonged to two individuals in modified Level-B white-colored Hazmat suits. The modifications included additional pockets and pouches, along with prominent identification patches on the left breast.

One read _Doku_, or "Poison;" the other _Yaku_, or "Medicine."

"Fight over already?" the first asked in a brash female voice. She tacked on the 'over' or 'please' both twins tended to use when they spoke. "My poisons make this too-too easy, _douzo_."

The other girl knelt over and carefully removed the deadly Mandragora Root from its victim. She held the deadly little root in her hand, inspecting it with disdain veiled by the gas mask she wore.

"Real fights start now, _douzo_," Lin Ke replied, turning her head towards the upended alien ship and the sounds of battle there.

-----

Miles above and miles away, on the very border of space, a trio of silver disks streaked across the outer atmosphere.


	88. Death Under the Mountain I

**Before I get to the chapter, let me address one or two things first**

**Author's Note:**

One of the hardest parts of organizing and executing this story has been a matter of balance. Principally, this is the balance between the military scifi and the martial arts settings and elements. However, I have also tried to balance the many fights and "spotlight moments" so they are distributed to a number of different characters. I do not want this to be a story where one individual character completely dominates and the others contribute little or nothing to the narrative.

I have also always hoped to make each "fight" into a unique exchange between the characters. All of the characters fight differently, and the stronger protagonists are all basically on the same level if they fought to kill. Mousse relies on tricks and traps and surprise, Ranma relies on a single overwhelming strike and his ability to come up with counters to enemy moves, and Ryouga relies on wearing down an enemy through attrition.

Most of these issues should be covered in the story narrative itself. In fact, when I get a review that asks a question or hints at something they would like to see, I often try and accommodate or answer the issue within the story. This is also why, unlike many authors, I do not prefer to write direct review responses in author notes. Please know what I do read and respect all reviews, and that if you ask something and I do not or can not PM a response, it is because I plan to answer the question inside the story itself.

Lastly, I've had to make some cuts in this chapter to keep it from being far too long. Some of the action in this chapter will be further explored at a later date in flashbacks. As it is, I have put together over a hundred pages of fight scenes over the last 3 chapters. I literally have to move on with the rest of the story after this.

* * *

_For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. Despite a surge of activity in the __Far East__ theatre, and fierce battles waged to unseat the Sirius Conspiracy and avenge the loss of the Joketsuzoku village, UNETCO and the two new squads have prevailed time and time again. With the threat of __Cologne__ and other second generation Trenchards (alien human hybrids) looming ahead, the high command readies for a strike at one of the planet's last remaining alien bases. For __India__ and Juliet squads, confrontation with these corrupted master martial artists is inevitable. Finally, the last great push to drive the entrenched alien presence off-Earth has begun. Only with that done, can XCOM bring the fight to the stars._

* * *

"Clear!" Akane barked, hugging the wall and sweeping the room with her rifle. A sea of tinted green lay before her, highlighting the near pitch darkness of the room. So many alien species saw perfectly in low light conditions that they rarely bothered illuminating most parts of their bases. Akane was still not entirely comfortable relying on the night vision equipment built into her personal armor, but it was better than stumbling around in the dark.

Squaddie Lohse took her flank and advanced, plasma rifle shouldered and ready. Golf Squad, like most of the four man units, had split up into partnered teams. It was the smallest operational unit XCOM used, since soldiers were never sent off solo. Two squaddies would be better prepared not only to support the other in a firefight, but also to counter any alien psionic attacks. An automatic warning would alert the other soldier present if one came under mental attack.

Lohse held up her hand and motioned for Akane to follow and cover the arc to her left. While all armored personnel had access to the secure communications network, many still used the silent hand communication they had gotten so used to in their special forces careers. Akane had picked up those cues, too, training with Golf Squad. She moved swiftly and silently, stepping over the burned corpse of a Sectoid.

The alien had a cauterized hole where most of its head had been.

Akane's motion sensor beeped.

"Incoming," she warned, "Two contacts. Eleven o'clock."

"Take cover," Lohse replied. The older woman hunched down against the wall, giving her a clear line of sight at the room's only door, and began to back up. They were in an open and mostly exposed area, but part of the wall stuck out at a slight angle. Two inactive displays were built into it. One was stained with pastel green and blue alien blood. Akane crouched down using the wall for cover.

A moment later, a grenade rolled into the room and exploded.

Alien grenades were extremely powerful, and even from behind cover, Akane nearly found herself bowled over by the blast. For comparison, she'd heard of a single alien grenade leveling a two story house and flipping a main battle tank into its back like a turtle. Overpressure waves washed over her armored form, and she fired into the breach. The laser cut through the air, burning and ionizing a hole in the still writhing inferno.

Behind and to her right, Lohse also opened fire.

A loud squeal of pain identified the target before it came into view. Squeezing through the doorway was a hideous creature covered with fur: a Reaper. It was about the size of a large brown bear, perhaps two to two and a half meters long. There were no forepaws; instead, it has two large and powerful legs ending with clawed, three toed feet. Patchwork alien armor covered much of its pig-like body, and two glowing red eyes crowned its disgusting face. A mouth lined with rows of teeth roared in pain and anger.

Reapers were just animals. The Floaters used them as terror weapons, and in that respect they were fairly formidable. No civilian in the world possessed a weapon that could really do more than piss it off. Aside from the armor covering different vital areas, Reapers had highly redundant nervous and cardiovascular systems, with two hearts and two brains. Not that they were even very intelligent animals: those two brains gave them the intelligence of a house cat. A huge, vicious, hungry house cat.

Akane pitched two AN M14 TH3 incendiary grenades.

Another blast of plasma hit the creature, this time only partly deflected by its exotic alien alloy armor. Its thick hide was tough, but still vaporized and burned anywhere near a plasma impact. The problem was doing enough damage to kill it before it frenzied. The Reaper squealed and started forward, prodded into combat by its cybernetic implants and the aliens behind it. Then the grenades went off, bathing the Reaper and the area in front of it in fire and molten iron hot enough to burn through steel.

The beast immediately came alight, its thick furry frame catching like a roman candle. Burning particles melted through layers of leathery skin and into thickly corded muscles and nerves. The Reaper slammed into the wall once as it turned around, panic filling its primitive brains and overriding the control the aliens normally had on it. Akane motioned for Lohse to follow her in, and she started forward through the breech and the flame.

They found a pair of Floaters on the other side of doorway. One was shooting at the berserk Reaper, and the other had the misfortune of peeking around the corner just as Akane barreled into it. It tumbled, trying to regain its balance, face twisting in hate and surprise. This close, Akane fell back on her martial arts training: introducing the creature to the butt end of her rifle and roundhouse kicking its weapon out of its hands. The moment she got some distance between them, she burned its head off with her laser rifle.

Akane turned and saw the other Floater on the floor. Squaddie Lohse's plasma rifle had blown the creature's upper torso apart, leaving little more than the metallic lower body and the bulbous hoversection that took the place of the legs. A couple meters away, the dead Reaper still twitched. Walking around and a little closer, Akane could see a Sectoid in its jaws, still clutching what looked like an alien stun bomb launcher. It had probably intended to inundate the room she had just been in while the Reaper pinned them down.

"You ok?" Akane asked, checking the room for any hidden hostiles.

"A little shaken up, but fine. You?"

"Pretty much the same," she admitted. If not for her personal armor, that alien grenade would have killed her three or four times over. Akane couldn't imagine how XCOM soldiers had fought and won against the aliens in the early days, back when they didn't have anything except conventional weapons and armor.

"Clear," Lohse said, but then amended it. "Look at this."

Akane carefully moved over to where the older woman stood, near one of the walls of the large room. It looked like some kind of alien laboratory. Many of the walls were lined with stasis tubes and alien incubators. A set of harvesting equipment sat, unused, near a far wall, along with a trio of alien operating tables.

Akane Tendo knew the kind of work the aliens did here.

It was a processing lab for abductees. Abductor class ships didn't handle all of the alien workload; they mostly juggled field research and short term experimentation with checking up on repeat abductees. When some poor bastard disappeared for weeks or even months at a time, they were taken to places like this in alien bases around the world. Here, the aliens could monitor and make adjustments to their tests under more controlled conditions.

She'd been briefed on this before the mission, and knew just what to expect in such a place. Given the presence of Sectoids, the most common finds were so called "deep abductees." These were missing persons, almost always female, who were used for assorted breeding and fertility experiments. After that, the mostly likely finds were clones or alien-human hybrids. The latter two weren't that bad, but Akane had been dreading finding anything like the first.

She passed by two empty chambers, but saw someone in the third: a humanoid shape, cloudy and somewhat indistinct in the murky fluid bath. The fourth chamber was clearer, and she saw one of them. The woman's midsection was clearly bloated and her eyes were open, following Akane as she walked by. In that moment, the youngest Tendo daughter wanted nothing more than to let the woman out and then go and kill every alien she could find.

But that wasn't procedure.

It also wasn't humane. Many abductees couldn't survive outside of stasis chambers; either they had been in them for too long (a report had once mentioned a woman being in stasis for five years), or the various implants or modifications made to their bodies were unstable. Some could be killed by the embryos growing inside them. UNETCO scientists would have to study each individual case to determine the appropriate treatment and response. Field ops were thus under orders not to intervene lest they do more harm than good. Akane knew this.

Still, that knowledge did little to abate the growing anger inside her.

"How many people are in here…?" she asked, seeing Lohse standing in front of one tube in particular.

"Looks like twenty or so," she older woman replied. "One of 'em is Dr. Hatledal. The others… well, I guess we'll let the labcoats sort 'em out."

Squaddie Lohse sounded only a little disturbed by the scene. Maybe it was because she had been serving in UNETCO long enough to become desensitized to the aliens' vile proclivities. Maybe she was just better at internalizing her feelings. It was hard to tell. Akane liked to think she had a closer relationship with Janis Lohse than her two male teammates, but they sort of became different people when the helmets came on for real and the enemy was in their sights.

Akane came up to where Lohse stood and checked the stasis chamber. No sooner had she gotten there when surprise pushed aside the disgust and anger that had so flooded her mindset. In the chamber, a pair of familiar eyes met her own and a small, wrinkled hand desperately touched the transparent wall.

"My God! That's…!"

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia  
**Chapter XXX  
_Death Under the Mountain_

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

Cologne's fingers flexed, tendrils of black tearing free from warm pink flesh. In the palm of her hand, the solid wooden staff pulsed with telekinetic energy, snuffing out the probing vines. Slapping the weapon aside, the beautiful woman's face contorted into a sneer, as if the sight and smell of something truly vile assaulted her senses. In way, that was very much the case.

"You…" she hissed, cocking her head.

"That's right," a voice, older but similar in tone, replied. "Me."

A withered, shrunken old woman stood before the statuesque Amazon, tapping one end of her cane to the ground at her feet. Long white hair that nearly reached the floor drifted lazily in an unseen breeze. A green outfit with yellow symbols, slightly burned but still functional, hung on the ancient woman's thin frame.

"Who let _you_ out?" Cologne asked, before tapping into the Mind. It has helpfully stored and returned the memories of those aliens killed outside the lab. "Two people I don't know?" She shook her head. "Wonderful. I told them it was a mistake keeping you in storage."

"I think they had doubts about the cheap copy they made," Ku Lon replied, giving her youthful duplicate a look normally reserved for over-ripe trash left on the curb.

The younger Cologne chuckled darkly in response.

"Cheap copy? Me?" She asked, amber eyes twinkling. "This coming from a withered old hag long since past her prime?"

"Better to die with dignity than become a pawn to ruinous powers."

"That has to be a joke!" Cologne pointed at her ancient counterpart. "Where do you think I came from? You **agreed** to become me! Youth and power and purpose! **You agreed to all of it! **All of **me**! Now, now, don't be bitter just because the youth part didn't turn out like you expected."

Elder Ku Lon tapped her staff again, and a cold wind picked up around her.

"You are an abomination."

"And you're jealous of that abomination," Trenchard Cologne groused, an identical wind rising around her and blowing her rich, dark hair about her shoulders. "But that's fine. **This** is fine. I don't think words will settle our differences, so..."

Elder Ku Lon's battle aura snapped around her, a vicious telekinetic sheath that literally bent reality to her whim. Frozen patches of ground cracked and shattered, flinging bits of debris into the air. Beneath it, the floor warped and shuddered as the alternating weight and power of her _ki_ sent a spiderweb of cracks out in every direction. She tapped her cane a third time, and the tip of it left a crater in the ground.

Cradling his arm, Ryouga could only gasp at the display of power taking place in front of him. If his _ki_ senses were accurate, then the old mummy was putting out enough energy to equal a perfect _shishi hokoudan_, but instead of it leaving her emotionally exhausted, she was cycling the excess _ki_ back into her body. The resulting battle aura could only be described as prismatic and almost _solid_: neither woman seemed to rely on any one emotion as a crutch at all.

Ranma, however, had seen something like this before. It was just like Happosai's greatest battle aura – the one that had nearly immobilized him when the old man mixed it with killing intent. Ku Lon's battle aura was perfectly balanced, expressing anger and outrage and confidence and depression all at once. It put his and Ryouga's to shame. They both wasted more than half their emotional energy, but here the old ghoul was using almost a hundred percent of her mental reserves. You could probably bounce a rock off her aura, it was so thick.

"Your existence is my responsibility," the older woman admitted. "It is only fitting that I be your end."

"Oh?" The younger her grew serious at the display, but didn't sound all too worried. "But can that weak body of yours really live up to those words? Well… I'll show you, _old hag_, just how **pitiful** and **obsolete** you are before me!"

Ranma blinked, and the two women nearly vanished in a blur of speed. He could feel the creeper vine slowly worming through his right leg, devouring both flesh and _ki_, but despite the terror it had filled him with just moments ago, he couldn't draw his eyes from this fight. Indeed, he intended to observe every detail as if his life depended on it.

Because sometime soon, it probably _would_.

* * *

Konatsu's body slumped as the mind holding it up left. The legendary kunoichi tottered for a second before falling against a strong arm. For a second, it was all that kept the young man from falling face first to the floor. The former Doctor Tofu's glancing pressure point attacks had overwhelmed him for a moment, flooding his mind with pure fear. It wasn't even fear directed at anything in particular, just a pure animalistic instinct-like panic.

"Keep it together man," a voice chided. "I don't want have to hold you up all day, you know."

"Ryu…?" Konatsu looked up at the India Squad member. "You saved me?"

Ryu Kumon's helmeted visage nodded from where he stood, next to the still dazed ninja. Konatsu could see the wound in his chest where Ukyou's battle spatula had hit him. The blow had been a complete surprise, accounting for just why it had been so bad. Even the most powerful martial artist needed some physical and mental preparation to withstand trauma on that level.

As it was, Ukyou's attack had slipped perfectly under the upper torso plate and into the exposed composite body glove. A long trail of blood had run down much of his lower body, but the suit's internal sealing mechanisms and the use of a medikit seem to have stopped the loss of blood. It was impossible to tell just how badly Ryu was hurt, but he was up and active, and that would have to be enough.

Konatsu also noted the other fighter's Mark IV Psi-Amp, affixed onto his right arm. He could still feel Ryu's lingering presence in his mind, and quickly deduced what had happened. Seeing the kunoichi at Tofu's feet, Ryu must have used his amp to take control of Konatsu's higher brain functions, bypassing Tofu's pressure point attack. It was quick thinking.

"Buy me a beer and we'll call it even," Ryu said, probably still sensing some of Konatsu's own thoughts through the recently severed psionic link.

"R-right," Konatsu managed to say, still shaking slightly. What a horrible technique the Doctor had used… a physical attack would have been preferable.

The object of the shinobi's ire stood alone, watching something off to the right. Konatsu blinked, not quite sure he could trust what he was seeing. One of the alien ships parked in the base garage was tilting and moving. But it wasn't the graceful sort of flight that characterized a rising UFO's gravity drive. It was almost as if someone was lifting the ship up from one side…

And then that UFO fell to the floor height-wise, so it resembled nothing more than a giant wheel. A moment later, it took off, rolling haphazardly towards the Doctor's position. Tofu neatly sidestepped it, only a small measure of haste visible in his moment. The rolling UFO went by him and crashed into the wall with a great crash before falling to the ground and rolling around on its sides like a massive coin.

"Oye Oye…! You're a quick little guy!" A loud voice called out, and a man in personal armor stepped into view. It was quite large: a little over six feet tall, and his voice was deep but with a youthful inflection. The newcomer's posture, bearing, and the unmistakable tint in his aura left no doubt that he was a powerful martial artist… and that he wanted everyone around him to be aware of that fact. Orange tiger stripe markings slashed the shoulder guards of his armor with color.

He also carried what looked like at least three large weapons on his back.

Three large vehicle-class weapons and enough gear that it had to weight more than half a ton.

"A Musk…" Tofu grumbled, straightening out his Ethereal's robes. "How annoying."

"Name's Lime."

What little introduction that was. Lime reached behind him with one arm and came back with what could only be a minigun. A long chain of rounds draped casually from the side, and some sort of arm assembly swung in place to lock it around the man's forearm. Lime handled the thirty pound weapon like it was water pistol, took rough aim, and indiscriminately opened fire.

The barrels spun and bullets began to fly.

The Gatling gun gave a long, loud growl, gobbling up links of 5.56x45mm NATO caliber ammunition at a rate of over thirty a second. A pound of ammunition fed into the weapon every second, spraying the area in front of it with an almost inescapable rain of fire. Lime swept the gun as Tofu moved, a barely visible streak of titian orange, trying to either keep ahead of the weapon's aim or shoot off in some random, unexpected direction. Almost impossibly for such a large weapon, Lime swung his arm and his aim from side to side as he pivoted left and right, the Gatling gun itself almost a blur.

Tofu stumbled.

For just a second, he hung in midair, hit by surprise from the recoil of just a few of those hundreds of bullets. With so many, so much, happening at once it was impossible to judge the trajectories or the intent of them all. It was how a martial artist could dodge a bullet: one had to read the intention and move out of the line of fire. But nearly everything nearby was made of alien alloys. The 5.56mm bullets would hit the floor, the ceiling, the walls and nearby ships and bounce off in intention-less and unpredictable ways.

Tofu's stumble, all half a second of it, cost him.

A dozen direct hits plowed into the doctor, who fell back, soaking up another twelve even before he hit the ground. Then he vanished in a flash. Lime pulled back his firing arm and jumped, narrowly avoiding the speedy doctor. Flipping gracefully through the air, Lime alighted atop a piece of alien equipment sticking out of the floor. There was no room on it for another person, and he pointed the still spinning barrels of the Gatling gun at a robe clad form standing where he had just been a moment before.

"I don't appreciate being shot, young man," Tofu said, holding up his arms. Flattened bullets fell from the alien fabric, unable to penetrate it. Had a normal human taken those blows, then the bullets would have still imparted enough kinetic energy to break bones and tenderize flesh. Against someone with Doctor Tofu's hybridized alien-human physiology the effect was… rather less.

Lime began to laugh.

"I guess I'll put the pea shooter away then," the Musk spoke up, sounding almost happy. Detaching the Gatling gun from his right arm, he let it fall to the floor with an audible clang. Tofu took off faster than most human eyes could follow, trying to close the distance.

Lime's right hand gripped one of his **big** guns.

* * *

"Huh? What's this?"

Koichi Ayabe had been running after his opponent but it now seemed like that opponent had turned around in the middle of an empty room. It looked like Mousse wanted to fight again. It may have _looked_ like that, but it _smelled_ like a trap.

Ayabe paused at the doorway.

It gave him a second to catch his breath, too. Running around like that was for kids and teenagers, not middle aged office workers. Not that it was tiring… just annoying. Like chasing after the dog that one time it got in the front yard. His senses spread out, scanning the room.

"All those land mines…" he said aloud so the boy could hear him. "You placed them awfully quickly. How'd you do that?"

Hidden landmines again, about 10 real and 20 duds; he'd have to disable them all to be sure. There also seemed to be a lot of barbed wire strewn around the room, some of it in plain sight and some hidden. A few coils were even set into hidden panels taped to the wall and ceiling. It was pretty elaborate considering the boy couldn't have had more than a few minutes to get it all set up.

"Hmm…." Ayabe still paused, thinking but not entering.

"Not coming inside?" Mousse taunted, drawing a plasma carbine from his voluminous robes. That wasn't good.

"I see no reason to," the older man replied, intending to turn and leave. While Cologne and the others had wanted them to finish off these talented young men and women, Ayabe wasn't in a huge rush. The whole thing seemed wasteful. These kids were good. He only wished he'd had talented friends like them when he was their age. Regardless, he wasn't in some kind of hurry that would necessitate jumping into an obviously booby tapped room like that. Nor was he particularly inclined to trade long range attacks with someone packing a plasma rifle (not if he could help it).

It was then that his seventh and sixth senses flared a warning.

Jumping away from the danger, he saw the walls behind him disappear in fire. He hadn't sensed anything substantial from them, but now he could guess with some accuracy that they had been trapped, too. With plastic explosive. Mousse had waited for him to pass the hidden bombs so they would drive him into the trapped room.

Ayabe landed on his feet, using precise bursts of electromagnetic energy to blow away and disable two of the concealed land mines. This boy… was very impressive. But kind of annoying, too. Fighting in here would be much more difficult, even with the advantage of his powered up _Hotaru_ (Firefly) battle aura. Besides, he could still leave the way he came…

Glancing over his shoulder, he saw someone new standing in the way, wearing the same XCOM personal armor all these people wore. He was shorter and smaller than Mousse, with the hilt of a sword in his right hand. The rest of the weapon was clipped to his back. There was something unusual about how he used his battle aura, too.

"And you are…?"

"Mint," the newcomer answered. He sounded like a teenager. He was also almost indescribably fast. Ayabe leaned back, his heightened senses alerting him to the attack, but his eyes unable to completely follow it. It was hard to believe, but this boy was faster than even Cologne. A small cut on Ayabe's left cheek dribbled blood.

Mint stood at the other end of the room, having crossed it in the blink of an eye.

"That was my way of saying hello," he added, flourishing his curved _dadao_ sword. It was large enough that most people would need two hands to swing it effectively; Mint brandished it one-handed with the speed and accuracy of a whip. Ayabe reached up and touched the cut on his face, surprised and impressed by the speed and accuracy of the strike.

The older man sighed.

"I suppose I'll have to kill two of you now instead of just one…"

* * *

"You're making us look bad, Saffron." Saffron knew that tone of voice.

"Lord Saffron!" And he recognized that one, too.

The Phoenix King turned, slowly, towards the voices. Flames lapped up from the stump that had once been his right arm. It would take only moments to regenerate, and he didn't spare it much thought. His ability to recover, nearly instantly and from almost any wound, was a natural aspect of who and what he was. It was purely an automatic reflex and required no thought on his part.

Saffron saw the two of them standing side by side.

He recognized Kiima first. The beautiful winged phoenix woman had been his caretaker for his last two and a half incarnations, and he vaguely remembered her as a child from a third Saffron iteration. She stood before him now, not in her ceremonial garb as Captain of his Royal Guard, but in some ridiculous foreign attire. It was an ungraceful and ugly outfit with large pockets all on the front and simple belts and buckles here and there. The color was mottled, like on a moth, and altogether undignified. That westerners and the current crop of Chinese rulers wore such a thing to war was all the more damning.

Then again, it was probably for the best that Kiima left her traditional accoutrements back at Jusendo. She had already disgraced them by allowing herself to be beaten by foreigners, not once, but multiple times. First Ranma and his ilk had made a mockery of her touted elite guardsmen and then the aliens had massacred them without difficulty. Twice Kiima had allowed him to be killed. He would have her head for it now that she was no longer of any use.

The second figure wore the typical armored raiment of the enemy.

It was similar to the swordsman's, but personalized with some familiar ornamentation. The shoulders, upper arms, forearms and knees were adorned with what looked like dark golden scales. It was impossible to see a face through the matte colored helmet, but glowing brightly through the armor; Saffron could see as well as feel a bright white battle aura, burning cold and emotionless like a block of dry ice. In this man's hands, Saffron saw something that gave him pause: the holy Gekkaja. The crescent headed staff was the sister to his own mighty Kinjakan, and just as fearsome.

"Herb," Saffron hissed the name. "That's you, isn't it?"

The armored man nodded. "It is."

Saffron muttered a curse under his breath.

Around Jyusenkyou, the two great powers are the Dragon and the Phoenix. The Joketsuzoku, mere humans, nestled between them relied on numbers and trade to survive. The Musk were isolationist, but occasionally had need of strong women wives to carry on their bloodlines. It was a poorly kept secret in many circles: that some powerful Amazons would bear a male heir for a Musk warrior and return to the village, the tryst paid for in full and promptly forgotten.

The Phoenix people, too, needed the Amazons. They needed to trade for goods, and preferred to use the warrior women as regional brokers and intermediaries. Like the deals with the Musk, the arrangement fed into the coffers of the Amazon Elders, cementing their power and authority in the region. The three powers thus lived in uneasy but relative harmony.

Herb.

This was only the second time Saffron remembered meeting Herb, but he still had the same impression from him. It was not positive. He had only been a child at the time, and Herb had towered over him, radiating cold disdain. They were both ruthless and powerful men, but Herb's chilly and haughty disposition rankled the hot blooded Phoenix King. Saffron well remembered those dark red eyes bearing down on him: analytical, arrogant, and totally devoid of fear.

It was that lack of fear, _that lack of respect_, that Saffron just couldn't forgive.

"We'd suspected you were working with those people," Saffron began, meaning UNETCO. "Have you no pride, _cousin_?"

"There is no pride in hiding under your mountain and letting the world grow stronger while you and yours go to rot. Then as now, the difference between us… _cousin_," Herb said the word like a curse. "Is that I control my destiny."

'You control your destiny?' Saffron repeated the words in his mind, feeling anger rise up inside. He could see those eyes looming behind Herb even now, looking down at the Phoenix King. How he _hated_, **hated**, **_hated_** those cold reptilian eyes, fearless and inhuman. How he hated that tiny flare of insecurity he felt in the presence of this man!

Herb felt his hate, and beckoned him forward.

Saffron's flesh split open, spilling out molten blood. Fire engulfed him like a halo. He had been holding back, using only as much of his finite power as he felt necessary, but now it bubbled out to the surface in response to his rage. His white feathered wings caught fire, and his hand clenched the shaft of his staff, the Kinjakan, with white knuckles. The entire room became am oven. There would be no more games.

Not with this opponent.

* * *

"You will not be the next Herb, Saffron."

Baleful, sanguine eyes glared down at him across hundreds of years. How many centuries had it been? The memories grew hazy and indistinct the further back he tried to remember, but that memory, of those reptilian eyes the shade of copper… _that memory _would not disappear into history's black depths. Lifetimes ago, he had been judged by Father and found wanting.

Weak.

"Your body and your chi are weak. You are unworthy of the name."

Father had beaten him within an inch of death and left him on the shores of the river of the damned. His brother watched: cold red eyes set against a curtain of darkness. The First Herb had two sons, but only one would inherit his name and the right to rule the Musk Dynasty. His brother, the brute, the fiend, had been chosen. He, the scholar, had been left to die.

The wounds had healed slowly. He remembered indistinct faces, battling with infection and fear. Hatred and spite had kept him alive. Years passed as he searched for a way to get his revenge. He had neither the inclination nor attitude to benefit from the brutal physical training his Father advocated. Saffron found a different way.

A better way.

He plumbed the secrets of the cursed springs, researching and gathering knowledge. He wandered the ancient world, learning and gathering followers. In time, he returned to the cursed springs and, after many failures, finally created the forgotten Spring of Drowned Phoenix. From that spring emerged the great mythical beast itself, which was then beaten, tamed, and made to sire the first True Saffron. Whether by chance or design, the son was born imbued with the memories and personality of the father.

Deathless! Invincible! Immortal!

Saffron!

* * *

'More! More More More!' Saffron's power was like a gas main. He could either use it, a little bit at a time, drawing things out for years. Or he could burn like the sun for a very short time. At this moment, he no longer cared what the long term inconvenience would be. He would not let those eyes look down on him as they had so many years ago, so many centuries ago!

'More! MORE!'

Herb thought him a pawn of destiny? No. **No!** When he and his father and his father's fathers rotted in the ground, worms and beetles hollowing out their eyes, he, Saffron, would sit on his burning throne and laugh. He had made his own destiny a thousand years ago, and he would survive. On Earth for a millennia and in space for an eternity. Herb thought him a pawn? He would bathe in the light of distant stars and laugh at the pathetic dead that littered the world once known as Earth.

He was Saffron, the deathless, the immortal!

Power coursed and congealed in his hands, enough to light up a city.

He would burn this bastard and everyone else in one move!

He…

He felt something cold in the pit of his stomach.

Looking down, Saffron saw the bladed crescent head of the Gekkaja buried in his abdomen. It was cold. Horribly, unbearably cold. Cracks of ice spread out from the impalement, numbing flesh and extinguishing fire. He tried to move his arms, but they were pinned to the wall by glowing blades of energy.

'What…? How…?'

The Phoenix King blinked, confused, and saw movement in front of him. His hands and wrists were wracked by pain and pinned over his head, bones breaking as they twisted. It was hard to grasp what had happened.

"Slow."

That voice.

"You're too slow. You never did train your body."

Herb stood in front of the Phoenix King. His right hand held the Gekkaja, burying it in Saffron's stomach. His other hand held Saffron's wrists, impaling them on a blade of pure _ki_, literally stapling his wrists to the wall. Pinned like a butterfly, Saffron tried to tear his hands free, but couldn't. They were bound too strong, and the bones in his arms were broken and out of alignment. He couldn't regenerate them unless he could line them back up. The Kinjakan hit the floor, no longer held by limp fingers.

Herb stepped back, helmeted visor expressionless and unsympathetic. A few stray flames clung to his armor, but the Musk Prince extinguished them with a wave of his hand.

"What?" Saffron coughed fire. "What did you…?"

"You could easily overpower me if given the chance," Herb remarked. "So I decided not to give you that chance. You're used to fighting in an open area, where you can fly and rain down attacks with impunity. You should have fled when you saw me, ready to fight you here with the Gekkaja. Instead you stayed. And now you've lost."

It hurt.

He couldn't heal… and…

It hurt!

Looking down, Saffron saw a spiderweb of cracks expanding across his lower body. The cold – it hurt so much, he could barely stand it. Fueled by the pain, he struggled, desperately trying to pull his hands or arms free. They couldn't move, and even his wings were useless in this position. He tried to concentrate heat in his body around where the strange energy blades impaled his arms and wrists.

"Don't bother," Herb said, observing him. "There is no material component to melt. They are constructs of pure ki. While I normally produce blades with this technique, I know full well that there is no point in cutting you. So… these nails will bind you while the ice consumes your body."

"I won't… I won't be beaten like this!" Saffron shook his head, struggling. "I am Saffron! I will destroy you! Landling! I… I…"

Herb cocked his head. "You…?"

Saffron's eyes darted down to the growing pain in his lower body. The Gekkaja's freezing effect had expanded even further, down almost to his knees. The core of his body was fighting it, but Herb knew all too well how to use the weapon. Without the Kinjakan to boost his own power, it would… it would…

"Kiima," he called out to her, eyes darting left and right. "Kiima?"

He found her standing next to that landling swordsman. She was looking away from her one time King, trying not to see him.

"Kiima!" he cried again. "Help me! Help me! I'll take you with me!"

Saffron saw her stiffen.

Yes: years of indoctrination and conditioning could do wonders!

"Help me!" he pleaded. The ice was halfway to his neck. "Kiima! I'll make you my Queen! We'll travel the stars together! I **need** you! Please!"

Herb stood and listened, unmoving. Kiima rose up behind him, holding Kuno up by his shoulders. With one last look, the woman turned and started in the opposite direction. The wounded swordsman did turn to look over his shoulder, perhaps in morbid fascination. Saffron watched her go, alternating between indignation and rage.

"No." He could feel the ice at his neck. "NO! **NO!** Traitor! **Bitch!** I'll be back! I'll be back and next time…!" He shook his head madly; flame belching from his eyes and mouth. "**Next time** I'll burn you all to cinders! I'll turn everything you know to ash! I am fire and death! All your deaths! Wait and see! Wait and…"

And then the cold seized his lower and upper jaw, freezing his mouth in a statue-like roar: teeth bared and muscles drawn. Golden eyes glared at Herb, never breaking contact; not even blinking as the growing frost inched up and took them. In seconds it was over, and what was left of Saffron, the immortal Phoenix of Jusendo, remained still and silent, crucified and speared a half dozen times against the wall, frozen in an effigy of impotent hate.

The instant Saffron's fire extinguished, the entire room became enveloped in a thick layer of frost. Herb let go of the very end of the Gekkaja, bits of ice trailing from his gloved fingers along with tiny sparks of ki. Turning towards Kiima and Kuno, his boots made soft crunching sounds against the frost underfoot. Imperceptibly at first, it began to snow, flakes drifting to the floor and settling on Herb's shoulders.

Kiima watched him with wide eyes.

Then she blinked, and snapped out of her surprise. "Saffron? Is he…?"

"I will deal with him later," Herb replied. His faceless visor turned slightly as he looked at her and Kuno. "Can you fight, Squaddie?"

Kuno also snapped out of his shock. Such a display of power…!

"Yes, sir," he replied, noting the Lieutenant's insignia. This had to be the leader of the martial arts squad based in Dongchuan, at the China Branch or UNETCO. He had never seen such a personalized personal armor, either. X-COM usually let its soldiers modify what they wore to some degree – it wasn't uncommon for former Special Forces to wear an old service patch somewhere, or so ink on words or little designs. Only flags and religious symbols weren't allowed. But this man, in his armor, seemed like a dragon in human form.

"Reinforcements will be along soon," he said to the swordsman. "Stay here with Kiima and do not remove the Gekkaja."

Herb walked away without further comment.

Kuno sheathed his sword and watched the man go with a mix of awe and relief. He knew about this man from Lieutenants Hibiki and Saotome and that they were the critical backup India and Juliet needed. From the beginning, the plan had been to separate and isolate the enemy martial artists, and then route the reinforcements to each individual fight, making for the most favorable match-up. It was divide and conquer, essentially, by picking off and eliminating those enemies they knew they could overcome. They would then gang up on and overwhelm the ones with unknown capabilities.

Kuno knew all this.

He just hadn't expected his reinforcements to give him the chills.

"Kuno to India and Juliet," he opened up the team-comm. "Target is down. Counterattack is underway."

* * *


	89. Death Under the Mountain II

* * *

"…counterattack is underway."

'About damn time!'

Not that Shampoo's thoughts were quite as bitter as they probably sounded. She was just a little eager to finally make her move. From the start she'd hoped to wear down and overpower Ukyou, incidentally proving her superiority over the other girl, but it just didn't seem like the universe was quite so kind. The alternative was a bit of a long shot, but at least now she wouldn't get bitched out for going ahead with it.

Intercepting a handful of thrown mini-spatulas with an identical number of _emei_ hair pins, Shampoo took off in a perpendicular direction. Those were the last of Ukyou's unconventional ranged weapons. Just as expected, the mind controlled girl reached down and retrieved her holstered plasma pistol instead of taking the risk and charging a _Hinode_ ki attack. The plasma pistol was far deadlier than any normal throwing star or similar weapon (even in the hands of someone strong enough to embed that thrown weapon in a block of concrete), but it was also inherently far more limited in application.

The two squads weren't composed of idiots.

Growing up, every one of them knew the strengths and weaknesses of firearms, and ever since joining UNETCO, they had trained to defeat enemies using exotic alien weapons: rifles and grenades and pistols. Unlike a thrown weapon, there was a very narrow but well defined cone that the weapon could discharge within. A comparison could be between a lantern and a flashlight. That Ukyou was now using this undoubtedly dangerous weapon was just what Shampoo had been waiting for.

The Amazon's left arm blurred, and she released one of her _chui_ battle maces. Normally, this sort of weapon wouldn't weigh more than ten pounds, or about four and a half kilograms. Shampoo's topped the scales at ten times that. Thrown at over two hundred miles per hour, the result was a not insubstantial amount of force. Not surprisingly, Ukyou's left wrist twisted on reflex, bringing up the wide flat of her battle spatula to block the oncoming projectile.

The maneuver, executed without the girl even thinking, left her back exposed.

Shampoo closed the distance between them in one rapid step. She reached into Ukyou's guard, using the fact that the chef had only one hand on her spatula and the other still trying to aim her sidearm. Straightening her left arm, Shampoo's muscles strained but succeeded in overpowering her opponent. Ukyou's left arm locked up and into an unnatural position. At the same time, Shampoo reached in with her right arm and seized the plasma pistol around the trigger guard. Her right foot snaked between Ukyou's legs, and in one smooth motion, her arms snapped out and she spun.

Ukyou's battle spatula twirled through the air.

So did Ukyou. Even in her mind controlled state, the other girl retained enough of her martial arts skill to stop her from hitting the ground face first. Bouncing like a ball off the flat of her left hand and onto her feet, Ukyou stared at her opponent with wide eyes. Shampoo relished it, even as she twirled the other girl's plasma pistol around in her right hand. It was what she had suspected all along: inside the massive weapon's guard, Ukyou was at her most vulnerable.

Shampoo briefly contemplated shooting one of Ukyou's legs, but just as quickly discarded the thought. While _obstacles were for killing_, as the old Joketsuzoku saying went, this particular scenario called for subtlety. Besides, something about crippling the annoying okonomiyaki chef had much less appeal now than it would have, say, a year ago. It wasn't like there were any other girls her own age that were worth a damn. Shampoo almost sighed at her sentimentality; if only Ukyou had been born in the village of warrior women instead of Japan, maybe they could've been best friends (or worst enemies)…

Ukyou came at her with her fists, finally bereft of any other weapon.

Any one of her blows could have killed a man three times her size. Shampoo tucked her stolen plasma pistol away in the belt around her waist and fielded the first half dozen strikes. Ukyou was already in less than perfect condition after trading blows with her for several minutes, bleeding from a badly torn lip, a gash over her left brow, and a black and blue wound just outside her right eye. Not that Shampoo was in much prettier condition. Neither would be winning beauty contests for a while… unless they were judged by the loony martial arts peers they had around them, anyway.

The two girls circled as they dueled: striking and blocking in a blur of savage motion. Finally, Shampoo trapped the other girl's arms, flipping her over and slamming her to the floor with a hard crunch. She then twisted Ukyou by her arm from on her back onto her stomach. The chef tried to counter with an elbow, but Shampoo caught it and wrapped her own arm around Ukyou's throat while straddling the small of her back. Ukyou hissed and sputtered for air as Shampoo's bicep cut off her wind pipe.

"Now…!" Shampoo reached back with her right hand, fingers flexing ominously. "Xi Fa Xiang Gao! Formula 110!"

The first four pressure points induced momentary paralysis. It was all Shampoo needed, and it was why she had goaded Doctor Tofu into keeping their helmets off. It was a two handed technique under normal conditions, but Shampoo was confident in her ability to pull it off with just her right hand. Of all the techniques she had learned from Cologne, the "Certain Kill Pressure Point Strikes" were among the most powerful.

Brutally effective against weaker warriors or those with inferior battle auras (frankly, this was some 98 percent of all Amazons), these techniques could be executed without one using vast amounts of externalized _ki_. All the variations of it left little or no physical harm, but instead manipulated the human brain. She could even use a form of "remote control acupuncture" that was one of the village secrets. Obviously, compared to what Doctor Tofu could do, and had done, it was pretty trivial, but Shampoo was still proud of being able to master it. Formula 110, however, was special: selective memory manipulation.

Shampoo felt her mind touch Ukyou's.

The experience was altogether different than when she had used the technique on Akane, two years ago. There was no primary mind running the body. Instead, Tofu's technique had what could only be called a sort of net, wrapped around the mind. This had to be the special paralytic meditation technique he had used on her. From there, she could sense an external force issuing strong compulsions that the enslaved mind had no choice but to execute. It was an amazing technique to be sure.

How to beat it, then?

"Ah!" Ukyou gasped, falling forward onto her hands. "W-what…?" Haltingly, she reached up to her scalp. "My head…"

"Still feel like killing me?" Shampoo asked, getting off Ukyou's back and standing over the Japanese girl.

"Only a little," Ukyou said, sucking up and spitting out wad of blood. "How'd you do that?"

Shampoo smirked, glad not only that her little trick had worked, but that she got to lord it over her rival, too. "You have heard of hypnotic suggestion, yes? What I used could be called hypnotic repression. Just like how suggestion can make someone believe they are hurt when they aren't, repression can make someone forget their pain. I made you forget that your body had been put into a meditative state."

Ukyou stared at her, finding the explanation somewhat lacking.

"Not that I'd expect a stupid okonomiyaki chef like you to understand," Shampoo added with an aristocratic twinkle in her eye.

She paused a second, thinking it over for a bit, before holding out her hand.

Ukyou took her hand, and Shampoo helped pull the other girl up onto her feet.

"Thanks, sugar."

"No problem."

Both women turned to look at the tumult off on the other end of the base's UFO garage. The boys were really tearing it up over there. Two building sized spaceships were upended and lying on their sides, while explosions, vacuum blades and tracer fire lit up the darkness. Shampoo tossed the plasma pistol she'd swiped earlier to her partner and cracked her neck left and right. Ukyou quickly checked the weapon and bend over, picking up the detached weighted end of her battle spatula. With a yank, the main body of the weapon flew threw the air and into her left hand.

"Shall we?" she chef asked.

Shampoo's smirk grew. "Let's."

* * *

YOU ARE BEING OUTMANEUVERED

We can handle it.

I AM NOT CONVINCED OF THAT

Watch. Saffron and Rouge weren't real examples of Mastery. They were just children with powers. Watch us!

VERY WELL SHOW ME

* * *

Ke Lun could feel the strain in her body as she fought.

Her arms burned in pain with every blow she delivered, and her bones threatened to buckle with every block and counter. Her _ki_ saturated muscles, weary from over a hundred years of use, and weakened by atrophy in that vile alien stasis chamber, produced a chorus of agony that reverberated throughout her being. It wasn't just that she was too old for this; her body would simply burn out if she kept pushing it to such peak levels of output.

"Ha HA HA!" Her youthful counterpart seemed to be enjoying herself.

Ke Lun blocked one of the beautiful woman's strikes with her cane, redirecting the force in a circular path through her body and back into her opponent. It was one of her favorite tricks, and the key to her hand to hand fighting style. It made her almost unbeatable in close quarters. The Trenchard double of her directed the force back, and the two warrior women spun, trading blows even as they dissipated the forces delivered into each other or into the ground.

Craters split the earth around their feet.

"Come on! Old Hag!"

Cologne's hair brushed by Ke Lun's face, opening a deep cut and erupted in crimson. The matriarch leapt, twirling like a top before splitting into a half dozen identical forms. She was already pushing her body's top speed, which meant that the Splitting Cat Hairs technique would be at its most effective. Her younger self just smiled, dancing around the first twenty blows from the multitude of afterimages. In less than a second, she was at a matching speed, at which point she used the exact same technique.

All fourteen Ke Lun images vanished as twice that number of Colognes appeared around them. Both of them new that the technique was only a distraction. Spinning her staff around her body, Ke Lun unleashed a dozen waves of battle aura. At the same time, her mouth opened unleashing a torrent of blinding blue flame. She barely had time to bring her wooden staff around to cover her back, where it blocked Cologne's flat palmed strike with only a millisecond to spare.

"Those old eyes must be failing you," the alien human hybrid noted. "You weren't even close."

Cologne's fingers began to glow a faint violet and the middle and ring fingers began to cut into Ke Lun's staff. It was _that_ technique. The younger version of the Amazon matriarch grinned wildly, amber eyes alight with triumph and savage glee. Finally she swiped her hands, shattering the bottom half of the staff and sending Ke Lun spiraling out of control and into the wet, muddy floor. Ke Lun spat blood but managed to get what was left of the staff up in time to block a descending axe kick. A ripple of force shot along the ground as the old woman directed the inertia into the ground at her bare feet.

"HYO!" Ke Lun willed the moisture below her to solidify, and it instantly did so: rising as it turned to ice. A great sheet of it, five meters wide, rose up out of the muck and flowed over her body. For all of a second, it hit Cologne, and very nearly repeated what she had done to Ryouga just a couple minutes ago.

But then the ice sheet turned to water, and Cologne fell through it. Her hands blurred as she unleashed pulse after pulse of battle aura. Unlike Ranma or Ryouga's _ki_ attacks, hers were nearly colorless but no less potent. Ke Lun spun and twirled, blocking as many as she could while trying to get out of the area of effect. Shockwaves blew geysers of dead plant matter, mud and water into the air all around her. Those that connected jarred her old body to the core.

'I… I can't keep this up…!'

She didn't even notice one of the exposed roots strike, like a snake, and coil around her left leg. Cursing silently, Ke Lun spared all of a half second to shatter it with the broken end of her staff. It was plenty of time. A wave of battle aura and killing intent slammed into her, lifting her off her feet and sending her skidding along the floor like a pebble skimming the surface of a pond.

"You're insulting me," Cologne mocked her older self. "Fighting at such a pitiful level!"

Ke Lun pushed herself up from the mud and scowled at her younger self. The likeness was still frightening. Ke Lun knew how she looked: she was a shrunken, wrinkled old woman. It was no surprise the disrespectful young kids around her called her 'old mummy' and 'withered monkey.' She took it in relative stride, having been an old woman for a long, long time.

It was understandably unsettling to see her old self: tall, regal, beautiful and powerful, standing just a few feet away, with that disgusted expression on her face. Ke Lun had been as proud of her looks as any haughty young Joketsuzoku, back in the day. Amazon training tended to leave women looking less than the female ideal, but a warrior's practicality meant that most Amazons accepted this as the price paid for power. When a girl could survive all those trails unscarred, it was a sign of true fortune, of true genius, and of true greatness. The strongest men loved – demanded - beautiful women, everyone knew this, and those most comely and powerful Amazons were all expected to ensnare and _break in_ strong outsider men for the good of the village.

A hundred years ago, she had been a goddess.

Now she looked like a monster.

"I can hear your body straining to match me..." Cologne flipped her long dark hair and held out her hand, fingers curled like claws. "The sound of old bones moving makes me sick! **He** kept you alive as an emergency backup, but what use are you now? You're nothing! Become one with the earth, and **DIE**!"

A circle of spiny thorns and coiling, roiling vines exploded around Ke Lun. The planets were alien to her sensibilities, and did not respond well to her _ki_. This other Cologne, however, had a masterful synchronization with the unearthly life forms. They bent and twisted and split at her whim, fed by her _ki_ and her telekinetic control of organic and insentient life.

'Move!' Ke Lun willed her body to reach its limits. "Move! You have to move!'

The tightening coil of plants formed a dark cone around her. Pushing her leg muscles to their maximum tolerances, nearly to the point of tearing, Ke Lun shot out of the top of the trap just moments before it would have closed ensnaring her within. The ball of plant matter snapped together into a small ball and sunk back into the mud. Just a heartbeat slower, and that would have been it…

She saw her young self sneering in annoyance.

Ke Lun pointed her staff and focused her battle aura into it. It was not just a piece of wood. She always had it with her, and it was as much a part of her body as her weary legs and arms. The staff, infused with her _ki_ and bonded to her blood, glowed with an inner fury. In the span of a second, it elongated, stretching and tapering to a spear-like point. It crossed a distance of sixty feet in an instant, slashing into the ground and beyond.

Cologne snarled; a long cut on her left arm filled in with black vines.

"That damn _Ruyi Jingu Bang_ knockoff…" The young woman's eyes finally narrowed in something approaching consternation. "It's a fitting weapon for an old monkey."

Ku Lon shrunk the staff back to its regular size before expanding it again. It had been years since she used the full power of her staff, and the old woman could feel it greedily sucking up her battle aura. It was the product of a decade of research and experimentation: a weapon to supplant her weakening body and expand her skill set. It was probably the one advantage she had over this young alien-human hybrid. It took more than a year to grow the staff, and another year to get it to fully bond with its master.

While not as indestructible or heavy as the legendary _Nyoi-bo_ wielded by Sun Wukong, it was a versatile and powerful instrument. The staff was still gradually repairing itself from the damage before, and Ku Lon knew to be wary of her double's own use of _that_ technique. Cologne could break the staff if given the chance. Ku Lon vowed not make it easy on her: expanding and contracting the staff at high speed, she moved her arms at Amaguriken speeds, stabbing and slashing and spinning.

Cologne skipped back, cuts along her arms and legs sprouting vines. For the first time, she was starting to sweat.

"You…!" She reached up, feeling the deep cut in her left cheek; marring her beautiful face. Murder flared up behind her eyes, and a great gust of wind blew ripples in the mud around her feet.

"I've had enough playing around." Drops of water began to coalesce in the air around her, collecting and growing into small round orbs. Ku Lon recognized it immediately. She knew that move: it was the most powerful of all the elemental water techniques assimilated by the Joketsuzoku Amazons, only usable by those with an equal mastery over the Metal element.

She had invented it, after all.

'Damnit! I have hurry!' She aligned her staff and expanded it, hoping to get in a hit before _it_ was fully formed. She had always required a few seconds to assemble enough water and properly compress it. No sooner had she acted, however, than Ku Lon regretted making such an obvious and straightforward attack. This young version of herself was stronger than she had been. She should have used some sort of cover: a wood wall or a shark fist, anything to distract what was coming.

But it was too late.

_Kaitei Kikori_  
(Deep Sea Wood Cutter)

A brilliant blue line intersected Ku Lon's staff, drilling into the tip and scattering it into shredded pulp. Her free-forming staff could pierce inches of solid steel without effort, but against the oncoming pressurized stream of water and abrasive metal particles it was of little use. The thin blue line annihilated the tip of the expanding staff before cutting more and more into the weapon, nearly slicing it in two.

Ku Lon turned her head and dove to the side, forsaking any sense of dignity in a hasty scramble to avoid the cutting beam that swung overhead. The beam dwindled and vanished, only to be replaced by another. Ku Lon hastily ran her hand along the ground, and set off a wave of breaking points deep in the ground, sending blocks of stone upwards, breaking the surface of the floor like giant multi-ton walls. It took mere moments for two deep blue decapitating beams to converge, like scissors, slicing up the great blocks of earth.

Ku Lon cringed as one of the beams neatly cut a few inches off of her long white hair. The _Kaitei Kikori_ technique, if it landed, would cut so fast that she wouldn't even feel it. It was essentially impossible to block. There was no known material that could hold up against it for more than a few moments, and at velocities many times the speed of sound, it was nearly impossible to dodge once 'found' by the beam.

Conversely, it required tremendous amounts of _ki_ to compress and project the streams of water, much less form and collect the tiny crystalline abrasives it used. And even then, the _ki_ saturated water needed a third step to be completely effective. The water molecules needed to be held together in a coherent jet over long distances by telekinetically forming a web of molecular columns. It was the most powerful and difficult technique anyone in the village had ever developed using that element.

And since it was her own technique, she'd never come up with a counter to it.

"Hey, old ghoul!"

Both Amazon women turned their heads as the brash and disrespectful cry.

"Who are you calling old ghoul?!" They chorused, glared at each other, and then focused their ire on Ranma. The fool was standing uneasily but radiating confident, if erratic and uncontrolled, _ki_. Raising one hand, the pigtailed martial artist slowly unfurled his middle finger.

"I'm amazed you can stand, Ranma…" Cologne hissed, aquamarine orbs slowly circling her upper body. "But there's nothing you can do against me."

Khu Lon was inclined to agree. What was her son in law thinking?

'Granny! **Get down**!'

Khu Lon had heard quite a few voices in her head since that long night at the Nekohanten, but this was the first time it was one she recognized. Planting her battle staff in the ground, she swept out her hands, blowing away twin waves of dirt and mud, producing a trench. A second later, the world disappeared in a flash of white. A wave of force slammed into her body, and Khu Lon's beaten body hit the ground, numb beyond response.

* * *

In the adjacent Garage they could feel the tremor, and all three fighters paused to glance at the source. Only a short corridor separated the vast complex of alien gardens from the Garage. Since Shampoo had entered from the upper floor's western exit there had been little to no activity. Now, a deep rumbling followed the tremor, and a blast of air and debris cascaded from the open doorway.

Tofu would have blinked, had he eyes.

'Cologne?' he thought, reaching out to her via the Mind.

For the first time ever, there was no response.

His body tensed, and he wondered if that feeling that shot down his spine: was it concern, or apprehension? It was open to interpretation whether the youthful Amazon was the strongest of their little group. Certainly, she had handled Ayabe well when they kidnapped him, though he had been somewhat gimped by being unable to unlock his _Hotaru_. Her expertise in many areas was superhuman, even for them. This was different than what had happened to those guinea pigs Saffron or Rouge. If _she_ had been taken out, then it was something… bothersome. And troubling.

They didn't need this trouble; maybe it was best to fall back and regroup?

* * *

The alien garden burned.

Twisted wreckage and rubble littered the devastated remains of the once carefully maintained biosphere. Burns marked the walls and even solid structures of alien alloy were twisted and savaged. Chunks of earth rained down from the ceiling above; clumps of damp soil mixed with bedrock from the base foundations. Streams of water dribbled from blasted and ruptured irrigation ducts, running in rivulets down piled debris and pooling into growing puddles. Small fires burned, and the air thickened with black smoke.

A four ton boulder shifted, and an armored form emerged from beneath it.

Ryouga knew he'd seen better days. His personal armor was nearly unsalvageable. Pieces were flaking off, and his torso and helmet had been partly caved in. It was designed to absorb projectile and plasma fire, not extreme pressure. His own body, hardier than the armor in that respect, was what had allowed him to survive. Tearing off a dented and painfully bent piece on his upper arm, Ryouga winced. He could handle concussive force better than almost anyone, but even he felt like he'd had a face to face talk with a speeding train.

Worse than any of that, he could feel Cologne's blood vine in his right arm, barely held in check. Ranma had figured out that the only way to slow the vine down was to not direct any _ki_ into the area around it. It meant going against the natural impulse the body had to try and push out or expunge the parasitic infection. Ryouga trusted Ranma's judgment (at least when it came to martial arts), and quickly mimicked what the pigtailed one had described. The result had slowed the vine, and lessened the pain somewhat, but it hadn't stopped it. It was almost to his shoulder now, and if it got any further, even amputation wouldn't stop it.

"Ranma?" Ryouga tried to get him on the comm.. "Nabiki, what's Ranma's status?"

"He's alive," India Squad's controller replied, sounding a little worried. "Rachael says his comm. is probably damaged. She thinks he's buried somewhere."

"At least his idiot plan worked…" Ryouga stumbled, but caught himself.

They hadn't been expecting Cologne – the old Cologne they knew – to show up. Akane had apparently found her somewhere, and Ranma had sent a request up the chain of Command to let her go. Coming at a surprise to none, the old ghoul had raced down to fight her other self. It had given the two Lieutenants the time needed to finish setting up their trap.

From the very beginning, it had been doubtful that either of them could beat Cologne by themselves. Even together, by their own estimates, their chance of success was only 50/50. Ranma had nearly gotten her once or twice with his new techniques, and Ryouga had given it his all but come up short. Even together, right when they had thought they'd won, Cologne had bounced right back. It was humbling but not really unexpected.

They had planned for this.

Both boys suspected that Cologne wanted them alive. It was why they had planned to be the ones fighting her. First: they would try and wear her out, like Perfume had suggested. It was hard to resist the temptation to try and take cheap shots at her while Ranma fought, and probably likewise from Ranma's point of view, but neither were the best shots in the world and Cologne's speed and general battlefield perception exceeded their own. It was better to let them trade places and try and wear her down, or so they had thought.

With Cologne occupied, it would fall to the rest of the squads to match up and identify their respective targets. Romeo Squad would then break up to favorably reinforce India and Juliet. They would then counterattack at roughly the same time, overwhelming the more vulnerable enemy targets. By simply press of bodies they would beat even Cologne. In the mean time, Ryouga and Ranma would do everything they could to delay, fatigue, and weaken the formerly old woman.

That had been the plan.

Frankly, it was a lot better than the crap Ranma usually came up with. It was by the grace of god that the pigtailed lieutenant had been talked out of his first scheme, given that it involved a liberal use of magical incense and someone dressing up like a young Happosai. **God no.** A few hours later, they had a simple, working plan to corner and beat what were likely the world's most deadly individuals.

Ryouga wondered if that blast had actually killed the old bat.

Not the old-old bat, but the new one. _That_ had been a surprise, too. The Cologne they had been fighting wasn't the original, then? It had to be like his own Doppelganger: a copy made with his pre-existing memories. But this Cologne seemed different. His copy had been enraged and wild, cast aside by the aliens only to be used as a terror weapon. This Cologne seemed a _little _unhinged, but no more or less than any other martial artist Ryouga knew. She was still in control of herself.

What did it mean?

The lost one shook his head; he'd let the techs and the bioshop boys figure it out. He started looking around for a trace of her on the off chance she had survived the explosions. He and Ranma had planted four M150 PAMs (Penetrating Augmented Munitions) around the room at structural weak spots. Each 42 pound demolitions unit was equivalent to 200 pounds of C4. It was normally used to breach the hulls of smaller crashed UFOs, like large scouts and abductors. It was part of their last fall back plan.

Luckily, the old Cologne had distracted the young one long enough to set the last two charges. He and Ranma had then taken out the final element of their stupidly named "liberal application of high explosives technique." Ryouga still wasn't sure that simply **blowing everything to Hell** merited a proper martial arts technique name, but regardless… two jury rigged blaster bombs had completed the so called "technique." Throwing them into the center of the room and then ducking under cover didn't really take a lifetime of martial arts skill but it certainly helped when it came to surviving the resulting titanic blast and cave-in.

Ryouga stomped his foot, sending a tiny wave of _ki_ through the ground.

It was impossible to focus or control his aura with the parasitic vine in him, but he could still do small things like send _ki_ into his limbs. Actually setting off a breaking point was beyond him in his current state, but he could still sense them. Like a sound wave passing through the air, he felt out the world around and below. Abrupt differentials in the density and composition of breaking points allowed him to identify rock formations and veins of materials underground. It also made it easier to find someone buried in the rubble all around him. Unfortunately, the shapes were still rather blurred and indistinct.

One of them moved.

Reaching for his plasma pistol, Ryouga slowly walked closer to where the organic contact was emerging. It paid to be careful, though he doubted that – even if it was Cologne – she would be in much condition to fight. He stopped close enough to be sure that he could hit the emerging target with three solid shots of semi-automatic mint colored death. Taking aim, he saw the surface break in a dozen places as red and black vines burst out of the ground.

"Shit!"

He fired, disintegrating three that clustered together and another at the base before it could spear him like a fish. Acting quickly, he grabbed two others with his left hand, but another wrapped around his pistol and another around his leg, throwing him off balance. Falling onto his back, he saw a dark, bloody shape emerge from the ground, sinuously rising higher and higher.

It was Cologne, but only in the loosest sense of the word.

Her body was torn and mauled in a dozen places, many visible beneath her ruined Ethereal's habit. Her formerly beautiful face was half gone: the right side was little more than bone held together by ragged strips of flesh. Wiggling vines and creepers writhed below the red and white blasted bone. Two long vines snaked out of her mouth and around his arm. Another emerged from the ruined mass of her right arm, wagging in the air like a serpent about to strike.

"What… what the hell?" Ryouga tried to raise his plasma pistol to get off another shot, but Cologne tore it from his hand with the vine that emerged from her shoulder. Her breath came in ragged gasps and her body convulsed as her battle aura reset the bones in her chest. Whatever pretense she may have had about being human could never mesh when what stood in front of him now.

"I won't… be killed so easily…" she said, pink tongue licking what was left of her ruby red lips. "As long as I have life to feed on, I can not die."

Reaching down, Cologne sunk her claw-like hands into his helmet, viciously tearing off the visor. The audio part of his HUD wailed in distress and alarm, but his armor's containment had long since been breached already. The claxon faded away after a few seconds, and the torn mouthpiece fell away to one side. Cologne threw the ruined piece of his personal armor away as she glared down at him.

"Yes, I know," she said, gently touching the sand blasted part of her face. "It isn't very beautiful, is it? I'll work on that. I want to have regeneration like Saffron's… something that doesn't make me look quite so hideous."

Ryouga frowned at her. "No matter how human you look on the outside, we'll all know what you are on the inside."

Cologne didn't reply at first.

Then her brows creased up in vexation. "What… what a terrible thing to say, Ryouga-kun. _I'll make you regret those unkind words_."

The fingers on her left hand flexed, and a surge of _ki_ ran down her arm. He had seen some of her telekinetic aura projections before, but this was different. The energy was building in her hand and vibrating the air. A low hum painfully assaulted his ears as he stared, wide eyes at the faint violet hue that enveloped Cologne's hand and lower arm. Bits of her titian robe tore away and disintegrated under the assault, and a trickle of blood fell from his right ear. The air literally screamed with energy, the air molecules vibrating more and more.

"Sanryoukyou," she told him its name. _Prism_. "When all five elemental states are used at once, they annihilate each other and everything they make contact with. Put simply: it creates an area where molecular bonds no longer exist."

And then she struck.

* * *


	90. Death Under the Mountain III

* * *

Ryouga blinked and nearly missed it.

One moment, Cologne had stood over him, her left hand awash with soft violet energy: the product of a technique she claimed simply annihilated any matter it touched. The next, a splatter of blood hit his face, and he saw her reeling back, hand gone below the wrist. He blinked again, and saw Ku Lon standing in front of him, her own right hand also gone halfway up the forearm. A crackling violet ring expanded in the air between the two women.

"Stinking hag!"

Cologne kicked her older self, knocking the old woman into a fallen boulder with enough force to upend it. The alien-human hybrid took a moment to examine her missing hand, hissing in anger and pain. For a second, she made as if to move, but then turned towards Ryouga, taking note of what he now held in his free hands: two alien plasma grenades.

"Damn you," Cologne snarled, not so much at the lost one, but at her other self. With her left arm gone, and her right arm little more than bone held together by hastily assimilated plant matter, she (for once) seemed a bit hesitant to make any more big moves. For a few seconds, she seemed to think over what to do next. Ryouga held his last two grenades like lifelines, knowing they were the only things keeping his opponent at bay.

"**Ryouga-kun**…"

"That won't work," he snapped at her.

"Tsk," Cologne made a sharp, unhappy sound with her tongue. "Ryouga-kun, why are you being so difficult? You and Ranma… you're both so hard headed. I know what's best, so…"

"You know what's best?" he asked, astounded that she would even try and say that. "Look at you! You think turning against humanity is what's for the best?"

Cologne huffed in clear dismissal of the idea. "You have such a naive way of looking at things, Ryouga-kun. Since when did you become so obsessed with doing what was 'good for humanity,' anyway? I thought the Hibiki way was to look out for yourself and to survive, no matter how the world changes around you."

He grimaced; it was… true... to an extent.

"I've lost my humanity before," he finally decided to say, side stepping the question somewhat. He meant, of course, his Jyusenkyou curse. "I won't lose it again."

"Humanity," Cologne spat the word out. "Come now, tell me: where is the value in being _human_?"

She shook her head at his lack of vision.

"What even makes you human?" she asked, casually inspecting the cleanly sheared stump that had once been her forearm. "Is it how you were born or how you were conceived? Is it the flesh that slouches from your bones as you age? Is it the gods you worship or the pieces of land you die for?"

Cologne shook her head and looked at him with one hazel brown eye.

"No...! The value of humanity is in our capacity to become more than what we once were! My flesh, my people, my land, my Gods… I would gladly cast them all aside. My future is among the stars. Humanity's future is among the stars! Why can't you see that?"

Before he could answer, she turned her head and scowled.

Ducking, Cologne avoided a blast of viridian plasma from across the ruined garden complex. Proving to still be fast on what was left of her feet; Cologne dodged another two bolts and vanished in an abrupt burst of speed. Ryouga turned his head just slightly, enough to see what was in that direction while still not completely losing track of Cologne herself. Cresting a pile of rubble, he saw a plasma armed HWP. The small hovertank, built in the style of a Sectoid cyberdisk, seemed to be just the leading edge of a four man squad.

Or even a five man squad.

One of the armored figures was in worse shape than the others, and Ryouga could tell by what was left of his battle aura that it was Ranma. He'd lost contact with Command when Cologne had torn off his helmet's visor, leaving little more than static over the team comm.. He had no idea what that other squad was.

Suddenly, a wall of rock and ice shot out of the ground, wreathed in alien plants. It knocked over and upended the hovertank, but Ryouga knew that was only a temporary impediment. It would easily right itself again, but the wall itself succeeded in interposing itself between the squad and its target. He saw Cologne alight on a broken piece of rock and start to gather water in the air into a sphere. She was slower with it than she had been before, and seemed to be visibly struggling.

Inhuman as she was, she **had** to be nearly exhausted.

Throwing one of his grenades, he heard her curse and speed step away from the massive explosion. A cloud of dust kicked up from the blast, and Ryouga had to shield his face from the heat and shrapnel. He was almost completely out of options: his _ki_ was still being sealed up and disrupted by the vine that was now worming deeper into his chest, his plasma pistol was gone, his carbine was lost somewhere, and he had only one alien grenade left. Just throwing it at her, there was no way Cologne would get caught in the explosion, even as powerful as it was.

Nearing despair, he saw a thin lance of blue cut into the wall. Some of it had already been excavated and blown away by plasma blasts on the other side, but Cologne's liquid laser finished the task. The top half of it collapsed and fell over. The beam sputtered, but was replaced by two more that indiscriminately cut into the rubble and the ruins, slicing madly in the blind hope of hitting someone. Crawling away from where Cologne had left him, Ryouga tried to get close enough to try something. What, he had no idea, but something was better than nothing at this point, no matter what it was.

He found her leaning against a piece of rebar, nursing her still missing hand.

'Now…' He cocked back his hand. If he was lucky, maybe she wouldn't see the attack and move in time. 'Please, please let this work!'

I WILL NOT ALLOW IT

A mental shock froze his arm in place, muscles furiously spasming. Closing his eyes, he felt a titanic presence behind his eyelids, malevolent and unrelenting in its intensity. He saw two boreholes, hot and red as the depths of Hell, burning like pits in a corpse-like face. For a moment, there was nothing else in all the world beyond that shadowed nightmare of a face.

It was **him**.

YOU ARE STRONGER THAN BEFORE

Hollow Eyes.

Ryouga focused his mind, falling back on his Ego Barrier. It was the deepest, most primal sense of self that a human being had, and it was the most potent defense one had against mental domination. It felt like a reassuring glow enveloping him and protecting him from the cold. He had been trained to resist psionic attacks. He wouldn't be beaten as easily as before!

'You killed Akari!'

AKARI

It didn't seem to totally understand names, but he saw the memory he had of her.

YES SHE IS ONE WITHIN US

'You killed her!'

THE RIGHT OF THE HARVEST IS OURS **YOU ARE ALL OURS** YOUR **FLESH** YOUR **MINDS** YOUR **DREAMS** YOUR **WORLD**

**OURS**

'No. Not yours.' His hate fortified him and gave him the strength – the psionic identity – to resist. 'You…'

And strike back.

'You will die here and now!'

A blast of mental force slammed into Ryouga's Ego Barrier, probing memories and thoughts for weakness. Ethereals were insidious and vile creatures, and they would exploit any chink they could find to drive the mind to distraction. That loss of focus would then be used to seize control. Ryouga held fast to his hate, refusing to let any of the probing thoughts or memories throw off his concentration. Then, he began to return the favor, making tentative probes in the alien's defenses.

HUMAN

It sounded angry and indignant. _Good_.

Ryouga prodded harder. He could feel; see in his mind's eye, this Ethereal's position among its peers. It did not have emotions or thoughts in human terms, and Ryouga struggled to try and understand them. He thought he felt conflict there between them, some ambition he could exploit, but it slipped through his fingers. It was too alien to grasp. He switched tactics, going for brute force. Enough psionic force and he could cause an aneurism in the creature's brain.

SMALL CREATURE YOUR MIND IS FRACTURED

Ryouga's concentration slipped for a second. What did _that_ mean?

ALLOW ME TO SHOW YOU WHAT YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN

The tingle along his skin, the indescribable feeling of shrinking… Ryouga knew _this feeling_. He had lived this nightmare before. …But where? Holding up his hands, he saw the fingers melting away, the skin and muscle turning runny and dripping off his bones like syrup off a stick. Then the bones themselves crinkled up like paper and turned to dust. His palms warped, changing into hooves.

'No! NO! **NOO!!!**'

SUFFER IN SILENCE

And then his mouth and voice were gone. The only sounds left to make were hoarse grunts and squeals. Trapped within his mind, a flood of memories drowning him and pushing him to the brink of madness, Ryouga found himself unable to even scream.

Hollow Eyes drifted past Cologne, levitating his flaccid and atrophied body over the ruin that had once been one of the world's finest alien gardens. There was virtually nothing left of it now, even if the humans hadn't been about to overrun the base. They would pack away a few samples and burn what little remained. Not that it mattered, not now, not anymore.

The Ethereal made no gesture to Cologne. Its thoughts alone were actions.

COME

'But…'

WE ARE LEAVING YOU WILL COME

'Yes.' She didn't want to get hit with a SUBMIT command, not in her condition, and not from this Ethereal. Hollow Eyes was already drifting away, the hem of his robes trailing lightly over the cratered and torn up floor.

Cologne took a moment to walk up to Ryouga's prostrate form. He was curled into a fetal ball and glowing a deep dark green. She could see the depression building up inside him, forming a suicidal battle aura. With no way of releasing the energy, it would either cook him in his own skin or simply explode, destroying everything nearby. She leaned over, and whispered into his ear.

"I'll be waiting for you two…" a small smile split her lips. "On the field of Mars. So try not to die."

And then she stood and walked away.

* * *

Hell.

This was Hell.

Small and helpless, wave after crashing wave of memories slammed into Ryouga's mind like a typhoon beating down the shore. Everything he'd thrown away when he'd cured himself came back with a ruthless and unrelenting vengeance. Twin moons lit up the starless sky, the pitiless hollow eyes directing a concerto of madness, while Cologne's words burnt lines in his psyche.

"Tell me," she mocked him, even now. "Where is the value in being human?"

_"Aw, P-chan! Mommy missed you!"_

**SHAME.** Like a cloud, it blanketed every brief flash of happiness. How often had his weary spirit lit up upon seeing that Dojo sign, that door with the duck on it and the kanji 'Akane?' How often had he taken guilty pleasure in her arms, in being loved, even if not as a man? Like a candle in the dark, that feeling always flared brightly for a time, only to burn out and plunge him back into the darkness.

He was _using_ her.

_Using_ her to make **himself** feel better. _Using_ her as a shield for his cowardice and indecisiveness. _Using_ her because he couldn't say how he felt or work up the courage to try and convince her to love him, too. **Using her** because it was **easier** to be loved as a pet, as a fucking pig, than as a man. Alone at night, he shuddered as he thought about how he would go back to her like that, even though, without fail, he felt like a piece of shit the moment he did. He could never bear to be P-chan for more than a day before the idea of just killing himself started to have even more merit than usual.

"What even makes you human?"

_"What a cute little piglet… You'll make some fine pork shahe fen!"_

**FEAR.** His directional curse tried to kill him. He had come to accept this, because it made him strong. In time, no animal could harm him; no natural disaster could kill him. Jyusenkyou added a new stipulation to the game called survival. It took his power, his body, his strength, his durability, his _ki_… and left him with only his wits, in a small, useless shell. Almost no human with a Jyusenkyou curse survived longer than a year on their own. Sooner or later, nature and fate claimed them.

How many times had he been caught in snares? How many times had he almost been eaten? How many times had he stared at those great butchers' knives and wondered: is this finally it? Will I finally die? They came with **knives** and **teeth** and **claws** and **pots** and **feet** and **guns**. It was murder with a thousand faces and in a million places; around every corner and in every shadow, waiting with glowing demonic eyes. _Fear_, so foreign to a man who can shrug off being hit by a car, became a constant and inescapable companion.

"Is it how you were born or how you were conceived?"

_"You think you've got it bad? I turn into a **girl**!"_

**ANGER.** What kind of a fucking world was this? What kind of a world **was** this?! Why didn't Ranma turn into an animal? Why didn't he lose his humanity? Why didn't he lose everything – the only things – that he had to be proud of? How he hated and envied that man. How he wanted to **kill** him; how he wanted to **be** him!

What else did the world want to take from him? He had no family. He had no friends. There was nothing to take pride in except his strength, and then even that had to be taken away. How he hated the world. How he hated Ranma Saotome. Sometimes, as P-chan, he just sat and watched the other boy in school, joking with his friends, teasing his fiancés, eating square meals every fucking day. The troubles Ranma had were things the lost boy would kill for, but never have. And he was weaker than Ranma. Hate him, his Grandfather said. Hate that which you can not beat, because it will kill you.

Ryouga knew the truth. Hate not because you feared that stronger than you. Hate, because if you don't, your life will be empty and you will have nothing to look forward to. Hate was better than being alone and having nothing. Hate was better than wandering the forests and the cities, no one knowing or caring whether you lived or died. Hate was all he had. Hate was a goal. Hate was a crutch. Hate was a life raft on a dark, stormy sea.

Win or Lose but always Hate.

"Is it the gods you worship or the pieces of land you die for?"

_"I'm home! Anyone here? Mom? …Dad? Shirokuro… at least you're here…"_

**LONELINESS.** Loneliness. God did he understand loneliness. He had even come to accept it, to find some solace in it, but then he picked up his _other_ curse. What kind of a woman would want a man that turned into a pig? He was sure he could, some day, get a girl to like him even with his directional problems. But this? A fucking pig?

For the first time, the thought that he would be alone, not just for years, but forever, became a reality. Promise a starving man bread tomorrow, or even two days in the future, and he at least had hope. Tell him he will starve, today, tomorrow, and until he dies and hope soon precedes him into the grave. Worse than taking away his strength, worse than taking away his humanity, Jyusenkyou took that tiny fraction of hope he had secretly harbored in his heart.

"The value of humanity is in our capacity to become more than what we once were! My flesh, my people, my land, my Gods…"

**She was right.**

"I would gladly cast them all aside. My future is among the stars. Humanity's future is among the stars! Why can't you see that?"

He hated her because **she was right.**

Cologne saw hope for the future in her tryst with those aliens. That was her secret hope, and she would do anything to hold onto it. He was the exact same. His memories, his identity, his life… he **would** throw it all away to get back that hope he once had. If the aliens had taken him in those dark days and told him they could cure him, he probably would have been standing by Cologne this entire time. What kind of a human being was he? What did it even mean to be human?

"I'll be waiting for you two… on the field of Mars. So try not to die."

_"Try not to die, ok?"_

No one had ever told him that before, not in any meaningful way. He turned his head and saw Nabiki, lying on his bed and staring up at the ceiling. She'd been like that for a while, and so he'd busied himself working on his technique documentation. Neither of them had said anything since that talk in the stairwell, but it hadn't felt right going to the movie with Ukyou and Ryu. So they went back to his place and 'hung out.' Not that he really knew what hanging out entailed, or how people his age acted under those circumstances.

"Hmm, well, uh," he answered, taking a few seconds to think it over. Honestly, he wasn't sure how to respond. It was such an odd thing to say: 'try not to die.' Should he just agree? It seemed superfluous.

"You idiots always did come back," Nabiki added, still looking up at nothing in particular. She still wore her baby blue blouse, but he blushed and looked away when he found himself staring at how it moved when she took a deep breath. He set his attention on the notebook in his hands, and how he would write down the secrets of the _Seirensho Tenketsu_. It had to be cryptic, but not so cryptic as to be indecipherable…

"You and Ranma and Mousse and Kuno, you guys always seemed invincible," she mused, and then added with a smirk. "A little stupid, but invincible."

It was her usual offhand compliment, mixed with an insult. It was usually an open invitation to get into some back and forth goading, but this time… seemed different.

"I…" Nabiki seemed to hesitate to continue. But she had already shared her worst secret with him. There was nothing to be gained in holding back little things. "I couldn't believe it when you broke your finger."

"Hm?" He looked up from the pad and paper. "When was that?"

She sighed loudly at his apparent obliviousness.

"When you tried to break open that chamber, you know… back on _the ship_."

Ah. That. He looked down at his hand. His finger had healed, of course. It was rare to break any bone given his level of body hardening. Ryouga found himself a little surprise that he hadn't remembered it right off the bat.

"Then when you went out in the airlock," she continued. "I thought for sure: he's going to die. This time, the idiot will die."

There was a definite hint of sadness in her voice; enough for even him to realize it. And he was pretty clueless when it came to this sort of thing.

"I don't think there was another option," he explained. "It was a close thing, I guess."

"Yeah…" she trailed off. He stole a glance at her, and saw her blinking her eyes. Was she crying? She'd been so emotional ever since she'd told him about what she did at Meiji, and he wasn't used to it. Usually, women were angry around him, not… weepy and talkative. It was even stranger for Nabiki, since she was so self controlled. Not like Akane or Ukyou, who had hot tempers and short fuses. He'd always thought of Nabiki as being greedy and intimidating, but at least predictable and reliable in her frostiness.

"Hey," he started to say, intending to ask if something was wrong. It seemed like a standard way of prompting a reply without really knowing what was going on.

"Nothing," she replied, wiping her eyes. "It's stupid anyway. Worrying about you guys. And Akane will be out there, too…"

Inwardly, he frowned. He didn't want his men to die either, and he certainly wasn't ecstatic about Akane being on the front lines either. But death was a part of the job, too. On some level, everyone accepted that, as much as they tried to avoid it. Still, he had the impression that it wasn't that sort of thing that she wanted to hear.

He took a page out of Ranma's book.

"Hah! I'm surprised at you, worrying about nothing!" Ryouga tried to put on a confident air. It wasn't his forte, but he managed (he thought). "Have a little faith, huh? How many mountains have we already destroyed? At least two or three! What's one more?"

She smiled at his weak excuse for humor.

"Fine!" She turned her head to look at him. Rolling on her side, Nabiki pointed at the lost boy. "But if you don't come back, I'll take all your finances. You won't have a yen left to your name!"

"Umm… but you already try and take my money. How is this different?"

That memory was an island in a tumultuous sea, but it wasn't the only one.

It wasn't just Nabiki. He remembered Kasumi, waiting for him to heal at the base infirmary. He remembered Akane coming to him to ask about how she can help contribute to the fight and get into a squad. He remembered Ukyou, bloody and beaten, leaning on her battle spatula and telling him she could still fight, still train.

He remembered Kuno, reading his sister's note with a small distant smile, missing his family despite how much trouble they were. He remembered Mousse, watching Shampoo from afar with silent intensity, getting stronger even though he knew it was never his power that she found lacking. He remembered Ryu and Konatsu shaking hands, and the respect the two had developed for each other despite that first rocky introduction. He had his mother and father, who, for the first time, were waiting and counting on him back at the base

And Akari…

Akari.

SUFFER IN SILENCE

But not alone.

Ryouga's hand clawed the ground, digging up a handful of wet, rocky rubble. His body was incandescent with sickly green and black _ki_; up swells of it shattered nearby rocks and fallen stones, cracking them like the finest and thinnest glass. Corkscrews of the poisonous mental energy coiled through the air. Everything in a hundred feet felt the oppressive heaviness of his raging, out of control aura. Its weight carved out a visible and expanding crater, flattening softer rock into a material the consistency of wet pavement.

'Suffer in silence…' _But not alone_.

His own voice cut through the mental torment: 'I'm not alone! And this isn't about me!'

"Even if I die. Even if they die! I won't…" this time he spoke; ripping himself free of the Ethereal's psionic snare. "I won't betray the trust people have put in me!"

On hands and knees, he sucked in a long, deep breath of air.

'I can handle this.' _That's right. He could._ 'I can handle this! What I've done… what I've seen… what I've been through… I accept it. No apologies. No regrets. No running away. No matter what happened, I'm alive, and that means I'll keep fighting!'

Gradually, the translucent green flames began to wane. The aura shrunk, contracting slightly at first, and then in more significant pulses: five feet less, then one, then one more, than another five, until it was all but gone. Letting out the breath he had taken, a fine blue aura permeated the black and green. He felt hot tears streaming down his face, and cupped his head in his hands. Not a sound escaped his lips, even when his aura, surging and spiteful to the last, finally vanished back under his skin.

"Cologne… you, and…" _him_ "…on the field of Mars, is it?"

Yes. That was where it would be ended, one way or another.

"….I'll be there… I'll bury you there!"

Slamming his fist into the ground, Ryouga split open the crushed and overstressed earth. Boulders split under the force opening cracks in the floor wide enough to fit your hand in. Massive upended stones cut a jagged relief in what had once been a perfectly flat stretch of land. Pulling his hand out of the shattered hole it made in the ground, he seized his right arm in pain.

'That damn vine…!'

He fell onto his side, biting his lip to muffle his cry. Even with Cologne gone, it was still inside him. There was nothing else to do about it. He reached down to his leg and un-strapped his utility knife. Tearing off what was left of the personal armor around his right arm, he stared at it – he could literally see the creeper under the surface, growing fat on his _ki_ and sending its roots into his flesh.

And it was already halfway across his upper torso.

He drank in the pain across his body, using it to build a mental map in layers of blood and bone. Like he had told Kasumi, pain was the key to understanding the body. It was no different with this than when he'd been shot in China, just after Jyusenkyou. Field surgery, often under the worst conditions imaginable, was something every Hibiki had to learn and accept at some point.

Feeling out the extent of the injury, he felt a sharp pang of despair: this was far worse than some bullet lodged in a rib. The vine had branched off deep into his muscles, almost to the bone. He would have to try and cut and tear it out, while using his aura to control the bleeding and knit the flesh back together. It… it just wasn't possible. He couldn't do it.

He'd… bleed to death….

Ryouga's left hand clutched the knife, and he lowered it to make a tentative cut. The vine had to be stopped before it went further into his upper body. He wasn't about to die here; not in this place!

"Easy there, sonny-boy. Don't be so hasty."

Looking over his shoulder, Ryouga saw Ku Lon, along with Ranma and two others. The old woman looked pretty terrible herself. She clutched her broken staff with one hand while tucking the other (he knew it to be nothing more than a stump) into her torn shirt. Never once had he seen, or even imagined he would see, Elder Cologne in such a state.

"Geez, man!" Ranma said from behind her, leaning over to stare at his rival. "I could feel how depressed you were, but are you quick to cut yourself or what?"

"Ranma!" he growled, wishing he could do something about the smug look the other boy probably had on his face.

"The old ghoul here'll help ya. She got those things out of my leg." He pointed at the appendage in question. Ryouga nodded his consent and carefully put the knife back in its strap against his leg. Ku Lon made him relax on his back, and mapped out the vine's infection with her eyes.

"Where were you…?" Ryouga asked, slipping a bit more back into his role as leader of India Squad.

"Back there," Ranma replied, waving his hand in the general direction of 'behind me somewhere.' "We thought you were gonna explode or something. I've never seen so much _ki_. Even made **me** want to kill myself!"

Oddly, the soldier standing next to him elbowed her superior officer.

Ryouga frowned. "Squaddie. What's your unit?"

"Golf, sir. It's… me."

Akane.

"Akane, you…" A moment later and he caught his tone of voice. He silently cursed himself. "Squaddie, where's is your CO? We needed a working comm.."

"Sergeant Winther was hit by some kind of… water laser…" Akane sounded a little uncomfortable. No: very uncomfortable. "He's… he's in bad shape, but he's stable. Squaddie Lohse… she's… dead."

Ryouga's frown deepened. All that, and they'd still lost someone. For a split second, he was just glad it wasn't someone from his squad. But that only made him feel like a total heel.

"It was pretty bad," Ranma interrupted. "I'll fill in the Lieutenant. Tendo, Khan, you two secure the area. Proximity mines at the north entrance."

"Yes, sir!" both chorused and headed off.

Ranma then turned to Ku Lon and nodded. Without warning, she slammed her remaining hand into Ryouga's chest, pushing her fingers in until they drew blood. Trying to see what she was doing, he could just barely make out something wrapping around her hand. The Amazon elder then moved her palm over from his chest to his arm, wrapping up the vines inside like a fork winding up noodles.

It wasn't a pleasant sensation, but it was only a little worse than having it in him.

Finally, she tore the last of the blood vine out of his body and hurled the gory mess aside. It hit the ground with a sick, wet splatter. Immediately, Ryouga began directing _ki_ into his chest and arm to seal up the wounds. They looked pretty bad, and as deep as they had been, he wouldn't be surprised if he ended up with a nice long scar. He supposed it was Cologne's going away present.

Ku Lon barely kept standing. A sheen of sweat ran down her wrinkled brow, and if not for her death grip on her staff at that moment, she probably would have collapsed.

"Thanks, granny," Ryouga spoke without even thinking. "No disrespect intended."

Ku Lon managed a weary smile.

"You kids never did learn how to show respect to your elders. Though… with elders like Happosai and your father…" She meant, of course, Genma. "I can see why."

"How are our squads?" Ryouga asked, turning to Ranma. They both had a lot of questions for Khu Lon, but he had to know how his people were doing. Hopefully, Ranma had gotten his comm. fixed, or appropriated Sergeant Winther's.

He didn't need to add: How was the mission?

"Not great, but not too bad," Ranma answered, a little evasively. "We've got Saffron and Rouge. Cologne and Tofu and Ayabe all got away. Kuno and the girls are pretty beat up and Konatsu's in bad shape. Ryu's hurt but stable."

"Konatsu?"

"Yeah. Tofu hit him with something in the confusion. He's unconscious. We've gotta head there next."

Ryouga nodded.

"Heard from the Commander, by the way," Ranma added. "There's still fighting going on, but we've got the parts of the base we care about. They're already sending in salvage teams. Losses were… kinda bad. They're saying one in six."

"Not so bad." The lost one hated to admit. It was better than the projected one in four. "We beat the odds."

"We will when Konatsu pulls through." Ranma tossed a plasma carbine at India Squad's injured lieutenant. He caught it in midair, and rolled onto his knees and then his feet.

It wasn't over yet.

But it _almost_ was, and truth be told, Ryouga was glad for that.

* * *

"Huh, I wonder, is this really all right? Sneaking off like this, with our tails between our legs?"

Ayabe walked with his hands crossed in front of him, as if in deep thought. In truth, he had a tendency to ask what he guessed someone nearby was also thinking but unwilling to broach. Cologne walked in silence, nursing her many wounds. Of the three of them: Cologne, Tofu, Ayabe, the latter seemed to be the only one to escape with only minor injuries. Ahead of the trio floated their voiceless alien master.

They were deep in the forest shrouded mountains, miles from the fallen alien base, having exited via one of the Korean escape tunnels. Normally, aliens would have given little to no thought to escape in this sort of situation, but the alien-human hybrid Trenchards were a special case. Snow flurries wafted through the air, collecting on their robes and faces.

"It can't be helped," Tofu admitted, a little grudgingly. He didn't enjoy talking anymore, not when he could thought project, but the others still seemed set in their too-human ways.

"Still, slipping away like this leaves a bad impression."

Cologne grunted in silent agreement.

"It is wise to know when to fight and when to leave," Tofu replied. Of the three, he had taken most readily to their new ways. He took the time to practice floating, though he didn't have an Ethereal's capability just yet. "We have all we need from that place. Let the others fight over it."

Ayabe frowned a bit. "I shouldn't have let Saffron-kun run off like that. If we'd kept a better eye on him and Rouge…"

"As individuals, they were of limited use," Tofu cut him off. "Their only value was in their unique abilities, which we have learned much from. We can create new versions of them as necessary. Better ones, since we are already on the verge of producing true martial artists. All we've done is drop the dead weight, Koichi."

Cologne nodded in silent agreement.

"Then what about the other two?" he meant the two Ethereal Commanders back at the base. This time, the one who led them answered the question.

THROUGH US THERE IS NO DEATH

THEY WILL BE GIVEN NEW BODIES TO INHABIT

"So they get downloaded while we have to walk?" the middle aged man surmised.

"For now," Cologne spoke up.

SOON YOU WILL BE READY

They perked up at that.

"And the others?" Tofu asked, though he already knew the answer.

WAITING

WAITING FOR YOU

ON THE RED WORLD


	91. Aftermath I

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. In late December of 2006, the two newly formed martial arts assault squads, India and Juliet, participated in the elimination of the last major alien base on Earth. With this bastion removed, the Sirius Conspiracy crushed, and the loss of the Joketsuzoku village avenged, only one great obstacle remains: the alien command center on Cydonia, Mars. Only then can Earth be safe. With that great battle looming ahead of them, India and Juliet also look inward to their individual hopes and dreams. This is their story.

* * *

People are the same everywhere.

Chinese, Laotian, Indonesian, Korean, Mongolian, Japanese. Doesn't matter. Was stupid to think things would be different here. When certain types look for cruel sport, animals are the easiest, most obvious prey. Stupid. Shouldn't have stayed and tried to scare them off. Stupid. Don't know how to fight in this body but didn't want to lose my pack. Didn't want anyone to loot around in it.

The one in a black jacket is cursing, stumbling, holding his broken nose. Wants his teeth back. Can't find 'em in the darkness of the alley. His friend laughed at first, but now they're both angry. Can feel the boot of the biggest one holding me down. Combat boots. Can't chew through them. Can't fight back.

Crushing me.

The three stand over me. Want to know why I'm just glaring up at them. No sounds. Won't give it to them. The boot crushes my side into the concrete. A rib finally breaks. Then another. This body is weak. One of them motions to an aerosol can. Spray paint. Plays with his cigarette. Says it burns.

Broken ribs send a bolt of pain into my side.

It's gonna be a rough night.

--

Don't know how the hell I got in here.

Some kinda zoo. Got turned around. Saw a sign that mentioned a shower. Running water usually means hot water, too. Got sloppy. Got stupid. Can see some people looking down at the large park area with the wildlife. Think I see one point at me. A woman yells something. My vision isn't too great in this body. Most of 'em are staring, waiting, watching with morbid fascination.

They want a show.

Three of the big cats stalk towards me as a leisurely pace.

They want a show?

I'll give them a show.

--

Can't find my pack.

Buried in the avalanche. Can't find it. Can't see it. Least I can smell it; one good thing about this curse. Ice cold snow clings to my body, soaking me to the bone. Parka gone. No telling how deeply I'm buried. Claw through the packed snow. Need to find my pack. Emergency heater in there. Emergency radio, too.

Cold.

Shivering is getting worse. Small body loses heat faster. Can't move through the snow as fast. Trouble seeing. Muscles not responding right. Gotta keep focused. Can't let the mind wander. Dig. Dig. The Pack. Dig. The surface.

Not good.

Cold.

Snow is white, but everything it dark. Digging wildly. Don't want to die. Body hurts. So tired. So very tired. So easy, just to give up. Just to close my eyes and go to sleep. What does it even matter? Why go on? Hurts. Cold. Alone.

Scared.

Akane?

--

Finally made it; finally found it.

Tendo Dojo.

Didn't think I'd make it in time. Double back a bit, think about it before I head in. Wanted to just go in as myself, but think better of it. Put that off for later. Takes almost an hour to decide. Cold water stings, brings on the change. Its worse when you know its coming; worse when you do it to yourself.

Put my stuff away. I know where it is, tucked out of sight for now. Head in with my presents for Akane. See the sign; no turning back now. Kasumi is out by the back hanging up laundry. She's wearing a pretty pink dress and white apron, and she smiles when she sees me. It's the same smile she always has for the neighbor's dog, even though it digs up the ground near the wall. The same smile the gentle girl has for any friendly animal.

I like Kasumi. Always have. She was always kind to me when I'm in this form, but it was as much forbearance as anything. She was the only one in the house, except maybe Ranma, who was happier to see Ryouga than P-chan. Don't think too much about it: too depressing.

Didn't come here to be depressed.

She goes 'Oh, P-chan' and picks me up, tucking me into the crook of her arm. When she bends over to pick up the presents I dragged into the back yard: a few boxes of candies from Okinawa I got while training… or was it Hokkaido? Doesn't matter. When she does it, I can feel the swell of her breasts pressing into my side from where she holds me, and I blush at the contact. There's a degree of dissonance, due to how small my body is. Don't really think of them as breasts so much when I'm like this, not at first, not like I would if I were human.

She carries me inside; she'll hand me off to Akane so she can get back to work.

Sounds coming from the living room. The television. Some program I don't know, don't watch, could never watch. Not with my lifestyle. Nabiki is walking to the kitchen. She sees us, and me, but I know her attention is on what I've brought this time. She likes sweets, and Akane always shares with her (or she just takes what she wants anyway). I note the boxes with 'from Ryouga' and 'your good and true friend' and stuff like that. They know who it's from.

And yet they don't.

Nabiki makes a smart remark about where the treats are from this time. Hawaii? France? Antarctica? Very funny. Don't get that lost…. least I don't think I do. Certainly never ended up in Antarctica (probably). She's cordial enough when she knows I'm around. A slight nod, a query about whether my interest in certain pictures has changed, a request not to level the dojo this time. I don't mind her, but I am a bit wary. She's civil, and more importantly, she doesn't know. Smart as she is, _she doesn't know_.

Forget about her.

Be careful around her, but forget about her. Akane's there, watching TV. She's with _him_. Kasumi calls to them, and Ranma turns his head. He's got one hand in a bag of potato chips, relaxing in the comfort of this big warm house, with Kasumi pampering him. When was the last time he spent hours looking for a soup kitchen or working for his next meal? He glares at me right off the bat, and I glare right back. It's satisfying to see him ruffled like this. He's so good at upsetting others, at playing them, but I can reverse the tables. I can discomfort him.

Yes, and I get a certain mean satisfaction from that. He is my enemy… or my rival… or whatever. Lately, on the road, I haven't been as driven as before. Not really. Not like a year ago. Sometimes, the thought of just putting so much of this behind us crosses my mind, but then I come back and shit goes down. Maybe it's my fault. Maybe it's his. Does it matter at this point? So we glare at each other.

There'll be a fight later; it's what we both want anyway.

Akane turns her head, and Ranma disappears. Been waiting for this moment. There it is: that smile. That smile. Warm and welcoming and utterly without hesitation or pretense. Genuine. Honest. Never get that smile when I show up as me, as a man, as Ryouga. She smiles, yes, but behind it I can see her worry and her doubts. When Ryouga shows up, either there is trouble, or there will be trouble. Fights follow. Things break. Sometimes people get hurt. Wish… I wish it wasn't like that. But it is. It just is.

But for P-chan, she smiles.

She doesn't really mind how P-chan pisses Ranma off. She enjoys it as much as I do. The unflappable, mighty Ranma Saotome. P-chan is her weapon as much as mine. Jealous of an animal, Ranma? Kasumi hands me over, like a plush toy, and Akane embraces me. Kasumi says something about what I brought, but I don't hear her. I'm in another place. It's warm and comforting and loving. Somebody loves me. Somebody wants me. Somebody is waiting for me. Somebody wants me.

Don't I deserve at least that?

Ranma makes a snide remark about 'Ryouga being back in town.' He's provoking me, and the words snap me out of my reverie. The fear of exposure, of the truth, always has my attention. Akane, bless her, is oblivious and asks how Ranma could know that. Ranma replies that it was just an educated guess. In Akane's arms, I watch them. Once snapped out of that one perfect moment, it always goes downhill.

Always.

Been worse the last few times. Akane squeezes me tight, and I feel my tiny back pressed against her. Don't really want it to be intimate. Don't want to sully it. _Think chaste thoughts_. Gets worse. Moment fades. Start to regret it. Maybe I should have come as myself. Maybe I should stop this charade. Maybe I should…

But I can't.

Because if I do, deep down I know Ranma Saotome is probably going to win again, and if I lose this fight, I won't have anything left. 'Maybe next time,' is the thought. Lies. Lies to myself. Lies to her. This isn't how I want it to be. This is what I have to settle for.

Wish I lived here as a man, and not as a pet. Wish I got that smile when I came home. Wish she hugged me when I was me. Wish I could sit, watching TV and eating potato chips. Wish I wasn't alone. Wish I had his life.

We'll fight again today.

I'll stick around for a while and then leave.

_Hate this place_.

--

Akari holds me in her arms.

"Ryouga-sama…"

Is this what it means to be loved as a man?

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia  
**Chapter XXXI  
_Aftermath_

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

The Avenger fighter-transport provided a smooth ride; so much so that it was almost impossible to tell when it accelerated, banked, or encountered turbulence. The gravity engines made hardly a whisper, bathing the main cabin in an almost eerie serenity. It was like stepping into a waiting room, waiting for an hour, and emerging on another continent. The experience had been a little disconcerting at first compared to spending hours on a plane or days on a fishing boat, getting from one island to another.

Ryouga sat with his face buried in one hand. Field bandages covered much of his torso and both of his arms. His body had taken enough abuse to kill two dozen ordinary men, but he could soldier through that. He didn't mind pain. He didn't mind discomfort. It was his mind that betrayed weakness, now. His mind and his heart.

Nearly lost in the memories forcibly returned to him, thanks to Hollow Eyes and Cologne, he hardly heard or felt much else. He was vaguely aware that Kuno and Mousse were playing cards with Ryu to pass time. He was vaguely aware that Ukyou was hovering over the still unconscious Konatsu with Ranma and Shampoo. He knew he was zoning out, but he had to get his thoughts back into order.

At least Akane wasn't here.

P-chan's memories were a mélange of the horrible and the haunting. It had brought so much misery to his life: so much fear and pain and humiliation and uncertainty, but mixed in with all that had been a few short memories of comfort and acceptance and love. He had gladly abandoned all of those memories before, and having them back, he wished he could offload them again. P-chan was a cancer in his life: a concentrated reminder of his weaknesses and failings as a man, and as a martial artist.

Despite his conflicted thoughts, he never let even an iota of depressed or enraged _ki_ escape from the prison of his flesh. He felt it circle uncomfortably around his abdomen before separating back into its constituent yin and yang. Using a _pranayama_ breathing technique that adapted the _ujjayi_ or "ocean" breathing for _ki_ circulation, Ryouga reigned in his aura. Inhaling and exhaling trough the nose, he regulated the magnitude and length of every breath with only his diaphragm. He could feel it working in his throat, and knew that not a hint of wispy black or green _ki_ escaped via his mouth.

Ryouga thought back to the alien-human hybrid Doppelganger of himself that he had fought before, and how its own internalized _ki_ had built up to the point where the hate and rage had been forced to boil out of its mouth. He had come close to going down that same path only to pull back at the last moment. He knew he had to master these feelings before they dominated and destroyed what few precious bits of an actual life he had managed to cobble together over the last few months. Unlike the Doppelganger, he had things he didn't want to lose. He couldn't afford to just throw it all away and become one with the maelstrom of bitterness and fury they both felt.

He was better than that.

"Lieutenant?"

Ryouga opened his eyes and inclined his head to the speaker.

"Something wrong, Mousse?"

The myopic martial artist pushed up the glasses over his eyes with his thumb. They weren't as thick as his old coke bottle knockoffs, only being about half as thin as the tip of a finger, but they caught the light and hid Mousse's eyes from view. Like all of them, he'd removed the upper half of his armor, leaving only an undershirt. He'd escaped the battle under the mountain with relatively few injuries.

He leaned in closer, conspiratorially.

"You got them back," he whispered. "Didn't you?"

Ryouga blinked in surprise. "How did…?"

"I may not see too well, but I'm not blind," the Chinese martial artist replied. "I can almost always feel something when I'm around you. Some trace of your fighting spirit. But right now, you're keeping it all inside."

The lost one smiled thinly.

"Mm," Ryouga grunted in acknowledgement. Mousse couldn't distinguish the love of his life from a statue of a tanuki with his eyes, but when he wanted to, his other senses and knowledge could more than compensate.

"You're right," the lost one said; there was no point trying to hide it. "But I don't think you need to worry. They had those memories of mine from the beginning but you were never abducted. You should be safe."

Mousse nodded silently.

"P-chan…" the near sighted fighter said it very quietly. "Was it really that bad? Shampoo and I both became animals, too."

Ryouga gave his comrade in arms a sidelong glance.

"Shampoo cooked me and tried to fed me to Ranma," he said it without anger. It was simply a statement of fact. "She cooked me, Mousse. In an oven. I was in there for _four hours_."

Mousse felt a sweatdrop run down the side of his forehead. He had turned into a duck; he knew the fear of someone treating you like food. Fortunately, he had never really worried too much about it. He had his knives, even in his cursed form, and he could always just fly to get away. Besides, if push came to shove, he was pretty sure that Cologne and Shampoo wouldn't have just let him be killed.

Four hours in an oven and he survived?

Ryouga chuckled darkly at that moment, interrupting Mousse's thoughts before he could really imagine what that must have been like. The lost boy rested his head on his hand, eyes closed.

"By the end of it, I was in a meditative coma. If she'd taken a knife to me when she took me out, or jabbed me with a temperature gauge, or even put me in for another hour, I'd definitely have died."

Mousse couldn't imagine it being one of the more enviable deaths to have either.

"You don't… hold it against her?" he asked, a little tentatively. Ryouga didn't seem to begrudge Shampoo anything. If he did, he never acted on it, or at least he hadn't after losing the memories of his time in his cursed form. But now that those memories were back, would that change?

Mousse felt he needed to know for sure.

"Hold it against her? Not really," the lieutenant responded with a shrug. "She didn't know it was me, and if I held a grudge against everyone and everything that ever tried to kill me in my cursed form, I'd have… a lot of enemies. Too many."

Mousse felt a stab of shame as he remembered how once, after a fight with the lost boy (that he had lost), he had threatened to tell Akane about his curse and turn him into Cantonese Shredded Pork. It had been a bitter, angry remark and he hadn't meant it. It was bad taste to even joke about something like that, especially from one Jyusenkyou cursed individual to another.

It was like "joking" about raping Ranma just because he was a girl half the time. No matter how much they had hated each other, no matter how much they fought, none of them were truly sadistic. An honorable death was something every martial artist understood and accepted and even looked forward to (after a long life, of course). For one of them, though, that ultimate fear and humiliation had actually been a terrible reality.

"There's a lot I'd like to forget," Ryouga said after a couple seconds of long silence. "And there are things… I'd like to be forgiven for."

Mousse knew, right away, what that meant.

He sighed… and elbowed his commanding officer hard in the ribs.

"Hey!" Ryouga growled.

"She'll forgive you," Mousse said, grinning. "She'll probably beat you up a little, but she'll forgive you. And if she doesn't, then fuck her! You've got plenty of friends who know all about it and who don't give a damn!"

Ryouga couldn't help it: he smiled.

"I hope so." Then he elbowed Mousse back. "But don't talk about Akane like that. Man, I can't believe you even just said that."

Mousse laughed boisterously. "Come on, what do I care!? Was I like the one guy in Nerima who didn't want to bone her or what?"

"Jesus Christ, Mousse!" Ryouga tried desperately to suppress the next few laughs. Luckily, their new English speaking compatriots had been quick to pass on some choice slang. "Shut up already!"

But the Chinese boy couldn't, not when he felt he was on a roll.

"I'm just saying, lieutenant: Nerima girls. Not my type." He looked up wistfully, as if lost in thought and nostalgia. "There's warrior women and then there's crazy chicks. Most of the Japanese girls I met around you guys were the latter."

Ryouga knew Mousse was just talking to cheer them both up. 'She'll probably beat you up a little, but she'll forgive you. And if she doesn't, then fuck her! You've got plenty of friends who know all about it and who don't give a damn!' He did, didn't he? Ryouga decided then and there. He could tell her. He could live with the consequences.

The Avenger tore silently through the sky; they were almost home.

* * *

**Western Oregon, United States of America**

**Northern Village Gated Community**

Pantyhose Taro savored another long slurp from his large coke, not minding in the least the loud noises made through the thick plastic straw. The soda was ice cold and delicious; just the thing to wash down the toasted footlong sandwich (a "sub" the Americans called it) he had finished a moment before. Piled high with lettuce, tomatoes, green peppers, red onions and generously garnished with oil, vinegar and extra oregano, it had truly hit the spot. Restaurants like this were popular here in the States, and Taro wondered if he'd ever be able to find ones like it when – if – he went back to China.

Life here was _good_.

He had a little light training in the morning, some half hearted schooling to make up for his truancy back home (who needed it anyway?), and plenty of time to relax. He even had a nice little apartment of his own in one of the buildings. It was "little" by American standards perhaps, but huge and luxurious compared to any place he'd stayed in before. He had his own bed, bathroom, kitchen, his own TV and his own magnetic key to the door. All he lacked was a car, which would have been moot since it was forbidden to leave.

It was a truly cushy lifestyle. He wasn't the only martial artist in the gated community either. Quite a few had been rounded up and transferred into protective custody over the last few months, and now settled down, they even had their own little mini-community that some of the more enterprising had set up. There was a large open park area in the center of the village for sports and open air movies, and some of the more outgoing martial artists had put on a welcome show for the locals to introduce themselves.

Taro had, of course, chosen to sit by the sidelines. Just because he liked it here didn't mean that he wanted to become some kind of showman or celebrity. His thoughts were on how he could turn this situation to his advantage. He'd already written off the idea of fighting against these monstrous "aliens" that Herb had mentioned. As if he would risk his life in a dangerous fight like that when there were plenty of others chomping at the bit to do their part! That was a job for patriots and suckers, and not necessarily in that order. Not like one more person risking their life would change the outcome of the battle anyway.

No: he would bide his time and make the most of what came afterwards. He still wanted his name changed to "Awesome Taro," but with Happosai dead (or so the aqua-transexual had said) his old village laws would forbid any legal challenges. With no alternatives, he'd have to just change his name via other channels. They'd still call him "Pantyhose" back home, but really, now that he'd gone out in the rest of the world, who cared what those village idiots thought?

Once he'd gotten his name officially changed, then perhaps he'd wander for a while, taking what he wanted. Or take up some light bodyguard work. He was a martial artist, but he didn't particularly care about that lifestyle or a devotion to the Art. He was just naturally good at it, and found it useful to be able to beat up people he didn't like (or people who were just in his way). There was a strong underground fight circuit back in China, and maybe here in the States, too. He could clean up; it was easy money.

Munching on a warm cookie, Taro watched a pair of girls in jeans walk in. They were high-school students, Americans, the daughters (or maybe younger sisters) of various soldiers, engineers or scientists who worked for "the company." That company, of course, being the same organization that shuttled him across the Pacific and that had some powerful individuals on its payroll. The blonde girl of the pair was so-so in terms of looks, but the other, the red-head, was definitely worth mentally undressing. Enjoying himself immensely, Taro didn't so much as notice the shadow that loomed up behind him.

At least until she laughed.

"OHOHOHOHOHO!!"

Taro's eyes grew wide, and he instantly bolted for the door.

He'd barely gotten half way to freedom when a violet colored ribbon made its first circuit around his upper torso. In the blink of an eye it coiled around his entire upper body, pinning his arms to his sides. The binding cloth was tighter and stronger than it appeared, constricting him like a snake and dragging him off to dispatch. With an abrupt yank, Taro felt himself flying back in the direction from which he came, twirling madly through the air. Seeing a chance for escape, he tried to snatch the half full cup of coke he'd left on the table with his feet.

Only to have a dainty hand grab it away a second before his feet got there.

"Damn!" Taro snarled before landing right back on his chair. Sighing, he leaned back until his head was against the back of the chair. Staring up he saw the refined face of his assailant.

"Hello, Kodachi," he grumbled. "What is it _this_ time?"

Kodachi Kuno was certainly pretty enough for his tastes, in fact, she more than exceeded his personal criteria. She had long, dark rich hair, perfect pink lips and large brown eyes. She also had a great body. It was an almost perfect package. Pity she was kind of a deranged lunatic. A deranged lunatic with a nice ass… Truly it was a deadly combination.

She leaned over to whisper in his ear. "You seem to have forgotten our date last night, darling Pantyhose."

"Don't call me Pantyhose!" He snarled, struggling against the ribbon currently holding him pinned to the chair. The giggling and pointing of the two American girls from before only further pissed him off. Fuming, beet faced, he glowered at the rich girl. At least she wasn't in her leotard, instead wearing some local clothes.

"Lovers shouldn't quarrel in such a public place!" she announced all-too loudly, pausing only to laugh contemptuously, covering her mouth with her free hand. The sound of it sent a shiver down Taro's spine.

"Why you…!"

Before he could finish cursing the crazy girl out, Kodachi slipped a hand sensually around his shoulder. Looking down at it, he saw a small plastic tube held between her thumb and middle finger. God only knew what sort of poison was in that vial. A few beats of sweat began to collect on his brow.

"You were saying…?" Kodachi whispered.

"I was saying… why… you… how nice to see you?"

"How sweet of you!" She kissed him on the cheek. "Now, let us take a romantic stroll!"

Flipping gracefully over the table, she tugged along her gymnastic ribbon, tossing him effortlessly through the air. Laughing maniacally, they exited the restaurant in a flurry of black rose petals. This time, Taro managed to land on his feet, and hastily tried to keep up with the prancing gymnast.

"Come, Pantyhose!" She gave him another tug, and he narrowly avoided falling into a drift of snow. Growling angrily at another thwarted opportunity to activate his _Jyusenkyou_ curse and escape, he grudgingly followed her.

"Now why did you miss our date?" she asked cutely. "I was so upset!"

Taro just grumbled something unintelligible.

"Bear in mind that your answer may determine your state of health for the next week or so," she added, holding up the plastic vial from a moment ago.

"masatarty," he grumbled again.

"Hmmmm?" she asked, leaning closer to him. "Speak up, darling."

He sighed. "I was at a party."

"A party? How droll!" She laughed again, haughy and condescending. "And why didn't I know of this! We could have gone together and mingled with the common people!"

"Maybe because you're crazy and scary?" he asked with a straight face.

She said nothing for a second, before bursting into another mad laugh. A second later, Taro flew face first into a metal lamp post. It was cold, too. Sliding down the lamp post with an audible "squeek" Taro fell backwards onto the ground, shaking a few bits of ice and snow from his wavy hair.

"Such off color humor you have, my beautiful gaijin!" she said between laughs. "Kuno Kodachi is the life of every party! Why, remember that one get together when I spiked the punch with that aphrodisiac?"

Taro chuckled villainously. That _had_ been fun.

Then he shook his head. No amount of fun was worth _this_.

"After you beg for my forgiveness, darling, you can make it up to me by helping me train for my match with that boorish Natsume girl." Kodachi started skipping along, waving him to and fro in the air like a kid with a balloon. "I've need for a new practice dummy! OHOHOHOHOHO!"

Tied up and at her mercy, Taro silently cursed.

There **had** to be easier ways to get laid.

* * *

**Seiran Mountain**

It was a strange thing, to stare at one's own severed head.

Off putting was another word for it. Saffron's hate filled eyes, frozen in a mask of impotent fury and mad rage, stared back at him through the glass. The flesh, _his flesh_, was tinted blue and purple as if it had been beaten instead of simply flash frozen. Still, he found that the macabre sight seemed to help him concentrate at times.

Saffron stiffened a bit as one of the mental probes bit a little deeply into his mind. Sitting calmly in his cell, deep within Seiran Mountain's Alien Containment Facility, the Phoenix King endured the procedures. He was well aware of his situation, and that given what he had gone through, any head of state from Burma to Britain would be treated to the same courtesy. He had no right at this point to complain.

For the most part, he felt nothing. He was only aware of the mentalists probing his mind because they had informed him of that fact, and even asked that he sign a contract consenting to the process. They would not release him else wise. Thus, he simply had to endure it.

Saffron's actual conscious memories of his servitude had been unclear at first. He had regenerated soon after being defrosted, and found himself in a strange place surrounded by heavily armed people. It had not been his home in China. Kiima had fortunately been present to inform him of what had transpired: that he had been captured and brainwashed (in a manner of speaking), and that he had been incorporated into some sort of alien fraternity. It had been difficult to accept at first.

Then, after the first session with the mentalists, the memories started to return. Prominent among them had been a young woman, a member of that troublesome Amazon village. Cologne. She had branded him with some sort of _ki_ seal, and broken him to her will. There had been experiments, too, at the hands of a man calling himself "Doctor Tofu." He had been aged artificially to near maturity, and awakened using appropriated Jyusenkyou Water.

Why had they done this?

Feeling the memories line up, like puzzle pieces, he could feel the answers begin to form in his mind. He had given himself wholly to the strange alien fraternity, lured and bewitched by both promises of power and the seal placed on his head. The seal that was still emblazoned on his frozen crown. Kiima had explained that no one knew how to remove it, and that Herb (Saffron sneered at the name) had opted to simply cut off all the affected parts of Saffron's body. That had included four of his primary chakra points and everything above the neck.

It was typical of that brutish dragon prince: solve the problem with force.

Saffron calmed himself, reminding himself that he had Herb and others to thank for his freedom. The truth was that he still felt something akin to a longing for what he had lost. Being connected to the great alien Mind had been an extraordinary and (in a way) liberating experience. From his slowly collecting and congealing memories, he found it inaccurate to describe the relationship as being between a master and slave. It had been… like a multitude of voices, in which the strongest and wisest held the most weight. Within that community, that fraternity, he had found a deep and abiding satisfaction and contentment.

It was something that even ruling over his people had not evoked in him before. For the last couple hundred years, Saffron had felt a growing apathy towards his Phoenix people. At first, they had been his children (many of them literally: his children from many wives), but they lived such short, weak, fleeting lives. When his sons died, and his grandsons died, and the many faces of his subjects just became one long runny blur… he began to wonder: what did they really matter? In time, he came to see them as pets, and he cared for them as such. Like pet dogs, they lived short lives, entertaining and serving their master.

Lately, the estrangement became even more acute.

There was a distinct bitterness to his reincarnation cycle. He was _shackled_ to these _people_, to this _mountain_, to this _life_. He was their light, their heat, their entire world. And he knew there was a word for the type of life they led: _**parasite**_. They were like parasites on his body, feeding off his immense energies and crippling him with the responsibility to keep them alive. The Mind had seen that, understood that, and offered him a better alternative. Even now, there was attractiveness to its proposition. Why tie yourself down to inferior creatures? Better to be among equals, among greats, and to touch the universe with one's own hands.

But he… couldn't.

He couldn't.

Enduring the mental examination, Saffron sat alone in his cell and wondered what was to come. Could he really continue being King to the people of Phoenix Mountain? The same people, the same kingdom, the same world, he had created? His feelings were unchanged from before. It wasn't hate, was it? No. Not really. But he pitied those people, and he found he could no longer truly empathize with them. Perhaps not with any human, any more. The vast stockpile of _shurikomi_ eggs he had ordered be gathered came to mind, along with his growing inclination to simply mind wash the entire population.

'No. No… I can't go back to that. For all everyone's sakes…'

Saffron discretely hid his face behind his hand, slowly massaging his temples.

'I can't. I won't!'

* * *


	92. Aftermath II

* * *

In an adjacent cell, another recent captive's rehabilitation was not going as well.

The being that had once been Rouge, that was now Asura, sat in a corner of her cell. Cologne's burning seal burned brightly on each of her three foreheads, undiminished despite confinement and isolation. Her previous attire had since been replaced by a layered medical gown, and she sat with her six arms wrapped tightly around her legs. To an outside observer the possessed woman seemed completely introverted, refusing to speak or acknowledge her surroundings.

When she had first awoken in confinement, removed from the connection of the Alien Mind, Asura had cursed and screamed and tried to escape. Escape was, of course, impossible for her. Rage and powerless had quickly turned to lethargy and depression. The demon had demanded death, and when that was refused, had even pleaded for it. Cologne's application of the Demon Seal could not be removed, and without that first step, most analysts had little hope for a full rehabilitation.

Unlike a true Trenchard, Asura had not undergone any significant "Etherealification." Her mind (minds, actually) had not been physically altered, and her body was not undergoing any atrophy. The hallmark of a Trenchard was the development of powerful mental abilities, including a form of telekinesis that would ultimately sustain the brain and the expanded consciousness, divorcing it from physical needs. Tetsuya Hibiki was an example of a Trenchard who had undergone only minute atrophy appropriate to his short time out of confinement. Asura, however, displayed none of the common attributes.

She seemed to have just been a powerful pawn.

It had been suggested, post-recovery, that she was simply collected as breeding stock for future Trenchards or other alien-human hybrids. The power of her cursed form would carry over to any offspring she had, a fact that could have made her more useful as a brood mare than as an actual weapon. It was impossible to tell for sure. X-COM had no intention of weaponizing Jyusenkyou for the same reason the Chinese government avoided the place: it was too dangerous and unpredictable. It was called _cursed_ and not _blessed_ for a good reason.

Now in the hands of UNETCO, the organization was committed to Rouge's eventual reprogramming (as they were all captured humans per the Charter). Breaking her conditioning to the Alien Mind would not have been terribly difficult under normal conditions. Even a clone engineered to serve The Mind could be cleaned up and reintroduced to society with enough work, though over the last few years most died in captivity (as most aliens tended to do). If a subject could survive with the link to The Mind severed, there was usually something to salvage. However, with Asura, there was no conventional way to break through the seal Cologne had used to control her.

She barely even looked up when someone approached her containment cell.

Shampoo watched the cursed woman carefully, a solemn expression on her face. This wasn't the first time she had checked in on her former foe. Locked in her cursed form, there seemed no hope for Rouge to ever return; her entire persona seemed to have been subsumed by the powerful demonic entity that now held dominion over her body.

It wasn't that Shampoo pitied her – that was not why the Amazon girl was here – nor was it that she felt some form of kinship. Shampoo had a hard heart, born from a tough life and forged by relentless trials and training. Pity, like mercy, did not come naturally to her any more. Neither was it satisfaction or a need to indulge her sense of superiority. Vindictive as she could be, it was not why Shampoo came to this cell.

She came here to remind herself.

_"Only you can do this." _

* * *

"What do you mean, great grandmother?"

"I meant exactly what I said, Shampoo."

Cologne held her staff with just one arm, the other missing just above the elbow. It was a stump now, but despite the disability the ancient martial artist and Amazon held her head high and kept her bearing proud. There were no clothes her size on the base, not a surprise considering her diminutive stature, so she had been allowed to mend and maintain the traditional Elder's robes she had been captured in.

The old woman had been released under special dispensation, and at the request of Juliet and India Squads. Nonetheless, she never went anywhere without armed escort and her movement was constantly monitored whenever she left containment. While she had fought nobly against her doppelganger, she had also been under the aliens' care for quite a while, and Command knew all too well the insidious nature of Sectoid and Ethereal conditioning. It would take time and effort before they were ready to pronounce her as ready to leave alien containment on a permanent basis.

X-COM did not take chances lightly.

Currently, Cologne's two guards stood warily near the Infirmary door. Both were trained psionics, wearing personal armor and integrated psi-amps. The Amazon Matriarch took no offense at their presence. If anything, she was surprised and taken aback by trust placed in her to be free at all. Her students – her former students – must have put much of their weight into vouching for her. The thought of that filled her old heart with a mixture of pride and shame, because she had **truly** betrayed them. She had turned her back on her humanity. The Mind… it was terrifying not because of its power to dominate, but because of its power to persuade. And she **had** been persuaded, thoroughly.

She and Shampoo now stood at the foot of a medical bed. There was a young man on life support, his chest slowly rising and lowering with steady even breaths. His body was essentially fine, recovering from some minor injuries and a few pressure point attacks, but his mind was locked in on itself. For all intents and purposes, Konatsu was trapped in a dream.

Shampoo looked down at her great grandmother in confusion, still not understanding. She wore a professional looking olive green shirt and knee length skirt with foreign rank insignia and a security badge clipped onto a breast pocket. It was so unlike traditional Amazon dress, so unlike what she wore when they worked in Japan even, that Cologne's mind kept mistakenly associating it with the Chinese PLA. According to the old laws, it was forbidden for Amazons to join any formal army. Their warriors had to be reserved for mercenary work that would bring money to the village as a whole (and the Elders, of course).

But that was moot now, wasn't it?

"Shampoo," Cologne explained. "I can not save this boy as you and… son in law wish. This is Doctor Tofu's work, and I can only see some of the underlying pattern he used. Even with the time needed to analyze his technique and devise a counter, I do not have the power or the body to reverse it by myself."

Cologne didn't outright mention her missing arm, but Shampoo understood the meaning. What she obviously didn't understand was that her great grandmother was not all powerful. She was old, very old, and like Happosai her body had slowed its production of _ki_ over the last half century. Her control was still exemplary, but it took weeks of building up the charge within her body to execute more powerful techniques (since she didn't 'cheat' the process like Happosai did with his disgusting fetish).

The sad truth was that she was not a young woman anymore, able to pick fights and duel with rivals for hours on end. Even a young pup like Mousse could probably wear her down if he played it smart and led her on an extended chase. She had given the fight with her alien other everything she had, despite the mental exhaustion of being in an alien tank for months, and before that, fighting off an Ethereal capture squad. Saving her son in law and his rival from the blood vine on top of all that had literally burned out all seven of her primary chakras.

Cologne doubted if she would ever fully recover.

"Only you, Shampoo," Cologne repeated, driving the point home by poking her thickheaded heir in the stomach with her cane. "Have the experience and knowledge of pressure points to save this boy and other victims like Rouge."

"But, but what about Ranma?" Shampoo continued to protest. More than usual. "Surely he…!"

"Ranma could learn, this is true," Cologne replied, tapping the tip of her cane back onto the floor. "But it would take weeks to readjust the flow of ki in his body to your level. It took a full year for your body to learn the techniques your mind already knew or have you forgotten? These are not simple pressure points! This is the very pinnacle of the Art, and Doctor Tofu was never an ordinary man to begin with."

Shampoo's silence was her reply, and Cologne could see that the girl was conflicted. She wanted to help, to be able to help, but the events of the last few months had taken a toll on her normally unflappable self esteem. Having to flee from the aliens in Nerima, having Ranma put his foot down on the tangle of fiancé arrangements, being an active martial artist overshadowed not only by male peers, but challenged seriously by an outsider female as well… then there was the destruction of the Amazon village on top of all that.

Cologne sighed softly; this was her fault as much as anyone's. Once she had taken over her great granddaughter's training, she had been fairly soft on the beautiful young girl. Shampoo had few real peers and no major rivals by the time Sink had handed the girl over to Cologne for the last steps in her training. Cologne had quickly confirmed that Shampoo was not exactly her "ideal" as a student and heir. She was lazier than Cologne had been at her age, and the girl was not a true genius like Cologne had hoped.

Shampoo's internal supply of _ki_ had also been rather lacking. She was weaker than her mother even, and Cologne had fallen out with her granddaughter over the Elder's relentless demands for perfection. Cologne had not wanted a repeat of that mistake. So while there were ways to increase Shampoo's reserve of _ki_: namely, strengthening her chakra points and building up her reserve by forced exhaustion and repeated exposure to near death in combat (like a muscle, it needed to be worked to the breaking point before it grew stronger) Cologne had also decided not to push the girl too hard.

Back in the village, Shampoo had been the strongest in her age group by a good margin, but she peaked early and hit a three-year long plateau. It was just her luck that, overseas, a generation of rival martial artists had surpassed her. Shampoo's apathy towards serious training had come back to spite her, and so had Cologne's unwillingness to push her great granddaughter as hard as she could have. This was the result: when faced with true difficulties in the Art, and serious rivals, she had difficulty working up the energy to push past the obstacles and get stronger. She'd lost her _edge_.

It was time for a different approach.

Cologne's staff impacted with Shampoo's head, hard, sending her to the floor in an undignified heap. Cologne's two guards immediately made a move, raising their weapons: modified stun launchers. They were the same weapons that the aliens had used to paralyze her back at the Nekohanten. Cologne made no move towards them. Instead, she twirled her staff around and pinned Shampoo to the floor with the cane's blunt end. She may have been a tired, beaten old woman, but she was far from defenseless.

"Sin Ke vouched for you. That's what I heard," Cologne said, pushing down as Shampoo started to recover from the blow. "But you are _weaker_ than her. Do you really deserve her seat in the Council of Elders?"

Shampoo hissed something in English and tried to force herself back up and onto her knees. Cologne pushed back down, driving her great granddaughter face first into the white tile of the Infirmary floor. The young woman gave one last push before deflating.

"Maybe I don't…" she finally lamented.

"Then that boy," Cologne inclined her head towards Konatsu. "Will surely die. And you will have shamed yourself, once and for all, before all those important to you."

That put a spark of fire back in her.

"When I was your age, Shampoo, I had one goal: to become the **strongest**. To become not just an Elder, but the greatest among them," Cologne said, pushing down harder on the young woman's body. Shampoo pushed back. It was good that she did; Cologne was more than willing to break a rib or three to drive this point home.

"I succeeded," the old woman continued. "I became stronger than any Amazon in the last five centuries. To reach this goal, I killed my grandmother, who stood in my way… I killed my sister, who opposed me. I tried to marry my best friend off to the most perverted scumbag I knew. And my husband… I branded him with the Demon Sealing Blood Oath."

Shampoo's struggles ebbed at that admonition. To seal one's husband meant turning him into a virtually mindless slave.

"Only later, sitting alone at that peak called 'greatest' did I realize everything I had lost to get there. The other Elders schemed against me. The rest of the Village was wary of me. I tried desperately to mould my daughter into an equal, and when she fell short, I tried to do the same with your mother, Shampoo. When you were born, I was a… very lonely woman. Deep down, I wanted to leave the Village. I wanted to just be done with it all. I wanted someone, some… thing that understood me for what I was."

Shampoo stared at her with shock and no small amount of confusion. "Why… why are you telling me this, great grandmother?"

"Because it was my _pride_, my _desires_, my _ambition_… that led to this point," Cologne answered with narrow eyes. "I never should have become an Elder, Shampoo. I never should have become Matriarch. A system that rewards the most ruthless and powerful can never be just, and it can never truly look out for the welfare of others."

"If you fear failure, then you will accomplish nothing. The future of the Amazons, all three thousand years of our history, now lies with you and only you. I will not and can not be a crutch for you any longer," Cologne explained with frosty tones. "Now: either woman up to the cards fate had played you or curl up and die! Which will it be?"

For a few seconds, Shampoo chafed under the pressure her Elder put on her. Then, without warning, she reached up and grabbed the shaft of Cologne's cane, pushing it roughly off her. The weight of it slammed into the floor with a loud thud, cracking the tile all the way through and up to the alien alloy superstructure. The young woman rolled back into her feet, and slowly stood.

It was hard, pushing Shampoo like this. It was true that fate had not been kind to her lately, but it was time to stop talking about what had to be done and start doing it. Was it fair that Shampoo had to carry the burden of fixing what her Elders had wrought? No. But it had to be done regardless. When Shampoo stood, Cologne saw determination warring with the girl's insecurity.

"Will you help me?" she asked, rubbing her side.

Cologne nodded. "Any way I can."

Hidden partly behind a privacy screen, Kasumi had heard and seen much of the exchange between the two Chinese Amazons. The two hadn't given her much notice, but one comment above all the others had stood out in the oldest Tendo sister's mind. Without a doubt, Cologne had said that he was the one who had done that to poor Konatsu.

Doctor Tofu.

Slumping back against the wall next to one of the stasis tubes, Kasumi tried to collect her breath. She had known in a roundabout way that her good friend Doctor Tofu had been controlled by these aliens. But he had always been such a gentle and kind soul. She had… she _still_ cared deeply about him. Covering her eyes with her hand Kasumi took slow breaths and tried to calm herself.

Ranma and Ryouga: they had brought Cologne back, hadn't they? And Rouge and even that strange man down in Containment. They could save Doctor Tofu, too, couldn't they?

Couldn't they?

Of course they could! So…

She felt hot tears in her palm.

So why was she crying?

Why did she have a feeling that she would never see him again?

* * *

Ukyou finished squirting the last of her bottled water into her hair in a desperate bid to cool off. Ranma had been running them ragged over the last few days while he recovered from Cologne's attacks. He had them waking up at six in the morning, running forty kilometers in a circuit around the base as the sun came up, and then shipped them off to psionic training for four more hours. After lunch, they went to combat training for either four or six hours depending on his mood. Sometimes it would be just him, Ukyou and Shampoo, and other times he'd have them pair up with India Squad.

The newest addition to their regimen was a simple belt.

Or maybe: not so simple. UNETCO teams were gearing up for "extra-atmospheric operations" and that meant training under different gravity conditions. Ukyou could read the writing on the wall. They'd been given gravity belts, based on the systems that powered the MARS MA-3C Mobile Armor. Small Elerium batteries projected a field around the wearer that simulated the effect of reduced gravity. In their case, it was 40% normal. In other words: the same gravity they would encounter on a small planet, like (just for example) Mars.

Ranma often had them practicing with two hundred pounds of simulated kit on their shoulders, arms and legs. They practiced moving, fighting and shooting under reduced gravity, and with different weights, over and over and over again. It should have been easier, but Ukyou found that her body was having difficulty adapting to the different conditions. Her muscles put too much force or too little into a jump or into moving an arm, throwing off her aim. One time she even hit herself in the face and clipped her foot with her own weapon. It was frustrating and hard.

Ranma directed them but couldn't fully participate.

He could move his arms and legs freely enough, but he was still too injured to do anything more than lead them in their morning forty. He made no effort to hide the scar on his arm, either, and neither did Ryouga, though his went all the way to his chest. Cologne's techniques must have been terrifying to have injured the two nearly indestructible boys like they had. Wiping away a mixture of sweat and water, Ukyou smiled at the thought that she was spending so many hours with her fiancé every day. She'd often hoped that Ranma would pay more attention to her, but this hadn't exactly been how she'd imagined it.

It was good work, though, and preparation for what was to come. Ukyou just wished that, as close as they were, that she felt some kind of spark between them. Ranma was still friendly enough, when not acting as her commanding officer, and always happy to join her or his other friends for a round of beer or foosball or a video game. But that was also the problem: 'her or his other **friends**.' Ukyou had also been spending time with Akane, and she had begun to sense that something was going on with those two behind her back. Behind everyone's back, really.

It was hard to pin down exactly.

Ukyou had tested the waters of her theory by dropping a few conversational hints here and there. "_How's Akane, Ranma? She treatin' you alright?_" "_Ran-chan's been awfully busy lately, hasn't he? Any guesses on what he's workin' on?_" Things like that. Both Ranma and Akane usually had very predictable reactions that Ukyou was used to hearing. Typically: "_That uncute tomboy's pissed off about 'X' as usual!_" and some variation of "_Who cares what that jerk's up to?_" It was a pretty standard litmus test for how things were going between the two, and it usually helped to keep Ukyou's spirits up.

Lately, though, Akane had started to have some actual ideas about what Ranma was up to. The girl wasn't a great liar, and hid her emotions pretty terribly, and lately she seemed to be getting more flustered by the Ranma related questions than angry or annoyed. Ukyou would have written it off as Ranma just being more mature lately; perfectly understandable given the situation! Except that her fiancé also seemed to have a more open interest in the activities of the youngest Tendo sister.

Ukyou's woman's intuition, underutilized though it was, could still detect a profound disturbance in the Force. Not that she was obsessive over it, per say, just that she was _curious_. And _concerned_. Rather concerned. After all, she and Shampoo had basically agreed to put aside the fiancé confrontation until the current crisis was over, and even Ranma had insisted on the matter (displaying uncharacteristic backbone when it came to the fairer sex). Neither of them had truly factored Akane into the equation, and it just _wouldn't do_ for the Tendo sister to be working, stealthy and sneaky-like, behind their backs.

That just wouldn't be fair!

The problem was that her typical allies weren't exactly of much use at the moment. Konasu was still unconscious, but while Ukyou was confident he would eventually make a recovery, he would never be a major player in the overall Ranma Affair. He had no interest in Akane in the least, despite a few belated attempts on Ukyou's part to set them up. _That_ had gone no where in record time. Shampoo seemed to be keeping her nose clean for once, and had brushed off the possibility of Ranma and Akane doing anything behind their backs.

Mousse wouldn't care in the least: Hell, he'd be the first to throw a party in the Dojo if those two were officially hooking up. Kuno had the motivation but none of the common sense. The rich boy didn't even have a clue when it came to Ranma or Akane, and there was little to gain (save headaches) by collaborating with him. As usual, that left her with only one viable option. In the present, though, that option seemed to have a decided lack of _interest_.

In fact, the last time she had broached the topic, he had projected killing intent at her! It was not an experience she was keen to repeat. Still, stealing a few looks at where India Squad was practicing nearby, Ukyou tried to casually read the lost boy's aura. If anything, he seemed to have calmed down and mellowed out since the last battle. His aura wasn't dyed in deep blacks and greens like it had been before, and he even seemed to be more openly and publicly enjoying the company of others.

He had definitely toned down.

Which meant that maybe he'd be a little more open minded and a little less of a crazy murderous jerk. It was literally him or nothing at this point. Ryouga was still Ranma's best guy-friend, after all; he had to have picked up on something; if not from Ranma, then from Akane. Ukyou had seen firsthand that Akane treated him like a good friend (in fact, she treated him like a good _gay_ friend who had no sexual attraction or interest in her at all), and Ryouga was the one guy she didn't get easily angry or fed up with.

Yes: he would do nicely. She'd just need to be a bit more discrete this time.

Step 1 of her brilliant plan thus began. Waiting for everyone to get off duty, Ukyou offered to take India Squad out for a few drinks, her treat. She knew from before just what would happen next. India Squad had cheerfully joined her at the Mess Hall after hours at the bar, and while the boys started on a round of beers she loaded up a DVD of Neon Genesis Evangeleon onto one of the Mess Hall TVs.

Step 2 of her brilliant plan was to separate her target from his friends prior to interrogation. This was actually quite easy. Kuno was soon asleep, his face beet-red. A little liquor mixed with his imported beer, and Mousse joined the kendoist in an Eva-psychobabble-induced stupor. All too easy! Ryu was the hardest to deal with. He could hold his drink and she knew he had a thing for her. A few friendly drinks provided the pretext for discretely knocking him out with her mega spatula.

Step 3: at that point, Ukyou was having some difficulty remembering what step three was supposed to be. Probably something about not ending up with an explosively depressed martial artist sitting next to her. It didn't matter. Step 4 was the important one! That was the one where she got some hard earned answers.

Like Ryu, Ryouga could hold his drink pretty well, and he didn't get sleepy like Mousse or Kuno did. He got introspective. He was the kind of guy who, if not actively engaged, just stared at his hands or at his drink and just _thought_. It was one of his more annoying traits in Ukyou's mind. He liked to just sit and think, sit and think, sit and think, but never come to any useful conclusion or commit to any real action. How often had he sat at her bar, silently lamenting his lack of a love life, wasting time dreaming of what could have been instead of what needed to be done?

Just as planned, with his friends out of the picture, Ryouga reverted to form.

It was just the two of them now, sitting at the bar with shots in their hands, watching part three of Shinji's crazy mindtrip only in the loosest sense of the word. Ukyou looked up to the digital clock on the wall: 0100. It was hard to believe that they'd have to get up in just a few hours. After high school, with the ability to literally make their own schedules, you'd think they'd have a little more freedom! She wondered if Ryouga was thinking something similar, as he glanced up at the clock too.

"Hey, Ryouga…" she started to say, frowning a bit as how the words came out slightly slurred. Damnit. Out drinking Ryu had been harder than she'd expected.

"Mm?" he grunted in lieu of a proper response.

This was it!

"Are, uh… is Ranma and Akane, are they…"

He blinked at her, uncomprehending.

"You think they're… I dunno, like sleeping together or anything?"

As the words left her lips, Ukyou's cheeks flushed in embarrassment. That wasn't what she'd wanted to say. Subtle! Subtle! She was supposed to have been subtle! She half expected him to fly off the handle (or at least fall out of his chair), crying about Ranma defiling his precious Akane and how she was too good and too pure for him. He did tend to go on and on about how perfect she was. It was another thing about him that annoyed the _okonomiyaki_ chef. Not that she went on and on about Ranma… oh.

Gods, they were both so pathetic.

"Sleeping together?" he asked, calmly. Rationally. He blinked a few times, his mind slowly processing the possibility. Then he sighed and stared into his half finished drink. The amber colored liquid sloshed around a single ice cube.

"Probably," he grunted. "They probably are."

"w… What?!" Ukyou blurted out, louder than she'd intended. Volume control was a bit off. "What was that?"

"Huh?" he answered, eyes half closed. "What was what?"

"Who's sleeping with who, you jackass?!" She reached for her spatula, but couldn't find it. She hit him with her fist instead. Hissing in pain, she shook her hand to work out the pain in her knuckles. Stupid lost boy and his iron body techniques!

He sighed and went back to staring at his drink.

"You weren't serious, were you?" she pressed, leaning closer to him. "Ryouga?"

"Who cares?" he asked. "Who cares what they do?"

"I do!" Ukyou reached over and gave him a good shake. "And you do, too!"

His guilty silence spoke volumes.

"Has Ranma… said anything…?" she dared to ask.

"He doesn't have to," Ryouga replied. In a more lucid state of mind, he'd have stopped there. In fact, he'd probably have kept his mouth shut from the get go. But with a few drinks in him, he couldn't quite keep his thoughts entirely to himself.

"Akane… tosses and turns. When she has bad dreams, she kicks and punches," he didn't explain how he knew that. Instead he continued, "I… I don't need Ranma to say something. Not when I can see it with my own eyes."

Ukyou forced up a smile. That was it?

Even if Akane did suffer from rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder, that didn't mean she had to be asleep to slug her pigtailed fiancé. That sort of thing can and did happen at all hours of the day. Everyone knew that! Ryouga had to have been imagining things.

"So Ran-chan was a bit beat up! That doesn't mean anything!"

The lost boy just eyed her like she was the one having delusions and not him.

"And," he went on, "He didn't deny it when I asked him. That same day, Akane asked me about… about some things. I know them. They've been sleeping together for a while now. I'm sure of it."

"But…!" Ukyou tried to think of something smart to say. Something to derail what she'd just heard.

"But they can't!" she all but yelled. "They can't! It… it isn't fair!"

Behind them, Kuno half work up, mumbling something about, "What long silky hair you have, pig tailed girl…" Except that the hair in his hand was black. And a guy's. Two large sweatdrops rolled down the back of Ukyou and Ryouga's heads.

Of the two of them, Ryouga actually coughed out a quiet laugh.

Ukyou quickly zeroed in on him for it. "How can you laugh with… with this happening! Ryouga, how can you!? Ranma and Akane!"

The lost boy put his drink down and rubbed his eyes with his hands.

"Ukyou…" he tried to argue in a placating tone.

"It isn't fair!" she repeated. He didn't seem to understand. "What about me? What about _us_!?"

"Ukyou."

"Ran-chan is my fiancé! I love him! He owes me…!"

Ukyou's hand found her mouth; she could hardly believe what she had just said. Turning away so Ryouga couldn't see her face, Ukyou bored her eyes into her shot glass, letting a long waterfall of brown hair hide her embarrassment. She hadn't meant to say that. What mattered, what she'd meant to say, was that he loved her, too. He had to.

For a few seconds, the only sound she heard was her own breathing. Then the ting of glass interrupted, and she saw Ryouga pouring another shot of sienna colored courage. Buoyed, Ukyou finished the glass in her hands, wincing as the liquid burned a path down the back of her throat. Silently, the lost one offered one last escape, and Ukyou accepted, holding out her glass while he poured out the liquid courage.

"So," she began, feeling anger well up to replace helplessness. "So they've been fucking all this time?"

"If you want to call it that."

"It's what it is, right!" Ukyou could get very angry very quickly, and she could feel all that boiling up right now. She didn't bother to disguise it. "I should have known Akane would spread her legs at the first opportunity! I just didn't think Ran-chan would…"

She paused, feeling his hand on her wrist.

Ryouga was frowning.

She probably should have backed off, but an angry smirk covered up the other more troublesome feelings she felt at the moment.

"You have a problem with what I just said, Hibiki?" she asked, challenging, hoping he would take the bait. It didn't matter that, in any actual fight, he could beat her in seconds. It didn't matter that she didn't even know where her weapon – the foundation of her fighting style – even was at the moment.

"Well, why don't you shut me up then, huh? Huh?!"

"Ukyou," he said in a voice equal parts angry and sympathetic. "That's enough."

She huffed and fumed, eyes flaring at his words. She hit him again, on the shoulder, which of course did nothing except hurt her hand. Finally her frustration came out in a single ragged breath, and then another, and then it slowly started to ebb out of her system. A fight, even a pointless losing one, would have been a nice escape, but the jackass had denied her even that. She had set this whole thing up, but this hadn't been what she'd expected to hear.

Or maybe, on some level, she had.

"I can't believe this," she all but cried, burying her face in the crook of her arm. "I can't believe they'd do this to me!" She turned her head slightly to glare at her drinking companion and ex-partner in crime. "Why don't you care? Why aren't you angry?"

He looked up from his drink, staring ahead into the darkness.

"I am," he replied, taking a deep breath. "I was."

Ukyou's eyes narrowed dangerously.

"I'll never forgive them for this," she hissed.

"Of course you will," Ryouga shot back. "You'll be angry for a while, and hurt, and you'll curse them and yourself. But you'll move on with your life."

"Feh!" she scoffed. "That what you did?"

He smiled wanly. "I'm still kind of stuck on that first part. But if they've made their decision, I'll live with it." Then he turned to her, eyes meeting hers. "You're a smart woman, Ukyou, and you could have any guy you want. Ryu…"

"I want Ran-chan!" Even she knew how petulant it sounded. She decided she didn't care even if it was. It was the truth. She didn't want 'any guy' she wanted one. She wanted her childhood friend and fiancé.

"Ranma isn't the guy you think he is," Ryouga said, sounding for the first time a little bitter.

"Obviously he isn't," Ukyou agreed, though it was mostly the anger speaking. "But while we're at it, Akane isn't little Miss Perfect like you think she is either!"

Ryouga scowled, but shrugged in acquiescence.

"Gah! We're too pathetic and depressing for words!" Ukyou threw back her glass and leaned back on her chair, setting her now empty shot down in the counter with an audible 'ting!' The lost boy just grunted and finished how own drink, too.

"All this teen drama bullshit," she grumbled angrily. "Akane and Ran-chan. Ugh!"

Next to her, Ryouga huffed. "Are you _really_ that surprised?"

"Actually I am!" Ukyou turned to look back at him, watching the lost boy over the curve of her shoulder. "I mean, they were always fighting. That's not how people act when they like each other!"

Before he could ask, she went on.

"When people like each other, they're like hearts and, you know, an atmosphere. You can feel it in the air. They hold hands in public and… and kiss in the halls and stuff." The chef suddenly seemed at a loss for words. "And the guy is always there for the girl when she needs him."

"That last part is true at least," her companion agreed. "Don't know about the other stuff."

Above them on the TV, the Eva title sequence repeated for a second or third time, bathing the room in a low light. The two still conscious teenagers sat in silence, a jumble of thoughts between them. Ukyou could feel a lot of the anger and bitterness settle into a shallow depression. Ranma had been the center of her life, literally, for a decade. She knew her father wanted to break off the arrangement and settle affairs with the Saotomes now that he'd actually found them.

She'd known for a while now (on at least some level) that things wouldn't just pick up where she and Ranma had left off back when they were children. Maybe it had just been a crazy dream. Ranma's training trip had changed him, and her training had changed her. He barely remembered those times they'd shared, all those years ago, and over the last few years he had tried – hard – to be her friend. Not her fiancé.

What a cosmic joke her life was.

Or… maybe it hadn't. Closing her eyes, she remembered her training, her fight with Konatsu, and how she felt when she cooked. She'd become a master of martial arts and okonomiyaki, and she'd reached that point in her life by focusing on what was important to her. Her love life was a joke, yes, but that wasn't all she had going for her. That didn't change the fact that her Ran-chan had broken her heart.

"I suppose they'll probably have a stupid wedding when all this is over," she decided. "And we'll have to go and cheer them on and take pictures and pretend we're happy for them."

"By that point," he replied, looking right at her. "You may actually be happy for them. I'll probably get lost, so you'll have to be 'best man.'"

"No way, Ryouga!" Ukyou kicked him playfully. "I'll probably be the bride's maid who has to get everyone to dance and cheer and stuff. Gods, it'll be so lame. 'Ok! Ok! Everyone on the dance floor! Why don't you and Genma-san go out and dance, Saotome-san?' I think I'd just died a little inside just imagining it."

He smiled earnestly at her lightening mood. In that moment, she realized that she was glad he had been honest and told her. She was even more grateful that he had stuck around… and that he hadn't risen to her baiting and decked her clear across the Mess Hall. He had already worked through the same thing she was feeling, and he had cared enough to help her through it. In fact, the lost boy had probably put up with a lot from her over the last few years. Either that… or she had had too much to drink and she was mistaking what she was thinking for a desire to clobber the bad-news bearing jackass.

Swinging around in her chair, she grabbed him by his collar and jerked him towards her. It was supposed to have been a cool, smooth motion, like in the movies. The impulsive thought that entered her head had all but screamed "cool!" Then they butted heads and fell gracelessly onto the floor. Even slightly inebriated, butting heads with a Hibiki had not been a pleasant experience. Ryouga could probably ram head first into a charging elephant and give the poor beast a serious concussion.

Ukyou quietly nursed her bruised forehead (and ego), while true to form, Ryouga seemed much more confused than actually injured. He sat up on the floor, crossed legged, rubbing his forehead out of shock. He reached for her shoulder.

"Hey, you ok?" he asked, rightly concerned. "What was that all about?"

"You idiot," Ukyou growled, also gradually sitting up with her legs tucked under her. "I was trying to do something cool."

He blinked, clueless as usual. "What? Like smash something between our heads?"

Ukyou glared at him, daring him to be more of an idiot.

"No!" she replied, when it became clear that he actually thought he had guessed correctly. "I was…" She trailed off, hesitant to finish.

"What?" he asked, cocking his head to the side.

"I was…" she rolled her eyes, hoping the low light hid the color of her cheeks. "I was going to kiss you."

His eyes widened perceptibly. "Kiss me!?"

"Tell the world why don't you?" Ukyou boffed him on the head. "It was just a stupid thought I had."

He wisely didn't reply. Which was good, because Ukyou was sure he'd just say something stupid. Then again, maybe he'd say something suave and cool. … Ok, that was pretty unlikely.

"I, uh… well, we're friends, right, you and me?" she asked, hoping to reason her way out of things. It had always been one of her strong points.

"I… I guess like to think we are," he added. "With what we've been through. I mean, I know we've had some differences, but…"

"But we're kind of alike," she finished, cutting him off. "And since we're friends, I thought: you know."

He shook his head slowly; he plainly didn't know.

"I've never kissed a guy. So I'm probably pretty bad at it, so I thought I'd… kiss you," she said, anxiously watching him for a reason. It was so stupid, the very idea, that she probably should have just forgotten all about it and counted herself lucky that they butted heads instead of lips. But with the thought there, and lingering, she had to find some way to get rid of it.

But… he hesitated.

"Because you can't kiss Ranma," he deduced. She made a note that he wasn't always as clueless as he appeared when it came to these sorts of things. The way he said it, though, made her feel kind of bad.

She stared down at her hands, not wanting to lie to him.

What kind of first kiss would _that_ be?

Ukyou cursed herself mentally, and she was on the verge of getting up and trying to salvage what was left of her dignity, when she felt a hand squeeze her shoulder. Looking up, she saw Ryouga looking intently at her, jaw tightly clenched. He had an embarrassed and unsure look to him, but he nodded once.

"Friends," he stressed. "Just… to see."

"Yeah," Ukyou replied, a little breathily.

But now that the moment seemed more certain, she found herself being less than bold. Partly, it was because of the blunder before that had gotten them in this mess, but mostly it was because she didn't know what to do. Despite all the TV and animes and mangas she'd seen, she was nervous. She'd tended to imagine that this moment – her first kiss – would be her triumphant victory over the other fiancés. All Ranma's other girls would be looking on with envy and she'd rub her win in their faces (especially Shampoo). This kiss, with someone else, in the dark, wasn't what she had expected… but she still found herself almost painfully anxious to experience it.

The two inched closer, and Ukyou closed her eyes. She could just barely feel his breath on her lips, and she quickly licked them with the tip of her tongue. The two of them paused there, just an inch or so apart, breathing the same tiny patch of air. They hadn't so much as touched yet, but Ukyou could feel her heart beating fast in her chest, pounding against her rib cage like a jackhammer.

Their lips just grazed each other at first, sending little contact shocks that ran down Ukyou's arms making her nearly shiver. There was no face to go with the sensations: she'd imagined that she would think of Ranma, or see him behind her closed eyes. He wasn't there. No one was. Maybe it was the alcohol, but even Ryouga wasn't there. There was just the feeling, new and exciting, running through her.

Then they touched in full, his upper and lower lips exerting a gentle pressure on her own. Without thinking, she pressed herself a little more forcefully into him, squeezing his lower lip. Then, just like that, it was over. He pulled back, and Ukyou felt a cool rush of air where he had just been. Their foreheads were touching again as they breathed, slowly, labored, adjusting to the moment.

Her first kiss.

It hadn't been so bad after all.

"T-thanks," she managed to say, catching her breath.

He backed up, and Ukyou felt a part of her miss the closeness they'd shared.

"Was that your first...?"

"No," he said with a hint of sadness. Ukyou felt silly. Of course it hadn't been his first kiss. She'd all but forgotten about Akari. Suddenly, impulse struck again and she hugged him, wrapping her arms about the powerful martial artist. It wasn't just for comfort, though it did feel good to have him there, and to know he was there for her. She wanted to make sure that he knew she appreciated it. Ryouga carefully returned the hug, resting his hands at the small of her back.

"Ukyou," he started but quickly found that he didn't know what to say.

"Don't worry about it," she spoke up, face still buried in his hair. "I'm just glad I could share this with one of my closest friends."

She felt rather than saw him nod in quiet agreement.

Tomorrow… she would have to face Ranma, face her squad leader, knowing what she had just learned. It had seemed like a nightmarish prospect a couple minutes ago, before she had calmed down; before she had come to terms. It still wasn't a meeting she relished, but at least the idea of it didn't fill her with paralyzing apprehension. At least now she didn't just want to curl up in her room and never come out.

She would face tomorrow and the pain it would bring and she would move on.

There was no going back now.

"We'd better get your pals to their rooms," she said, and the two stood and separated, hands finding purchase in pockets and hooked around belts. Kuno and Mousse were still sound asleep, face first on a table with their arms as pillows. Ryu was splayed out across a row of seats, dozing softly. Ukyou caught Ryouga staring at the other young man. A pair of eyes glanced her way, questioning.

"He's a nice guy," Ukyou felt the need to explain. "A little strange, but I mean… look at us. We're all strange, right?"

"Very," Ryouga conceded.

She reached out and grabbed the lost boy by his upper arm. "Let's just keep this between us, ok? Things are complicated enough already between our little group."

He nodded again.

"You can say that again."

* * *


	93. Aftermath III

* * *

At last, the Yellow Sea came into view.

Their escort, a handsome young man with dark apricot colored hair, breathed a quiet sigh of relief. The shoreline was deserted and would pose no obstacle to their journey. Pivoting, he motioned them forward, pale yellow eyes catching a ray of moonlight. Cologne skipped easily over the concrete embankment separating the shore from the forest beyond. Before her, the sea stretched on: a vast and empty expanse, hiding secrets from human eyes.

Doctor Tofu was close behind her. He alighted on the ground without a sound, and behind him, a more ominous figure floated eerily over the rock and sand. Last was Ayabe, who made no effort to conceal himself. He landed with an unhappy grunt, and upon seeing the sea before them, made an audible jeer.

"What?" he caught her look of disapproval. While Tofu had embraced The Mind, and Cologne was happy to join it, Ayabe was more… critical. This tended to make him a bit surly at times. "I'm enjoying the cool night air. You know, you should too… while you can."

"We're done with this little field trip," she replied, frowning. "I, for one, am happy to finally heading to our new home. This has been a long time coming."

AGREED Tofu thought, projecting himself into their minds.

Cologne rolled her eyes; her companion had pointedly not used human speech since that first conversation in the forest. From a distance, one would truly think him an Ethereal, and he would probably only get worse when they reached Mars. It would be impossible to enjoy a good conversation by that point, or at least one that didn't involve another mind blasting information into her skull.

Well, that was alright.

Very soon, she would have a veritable _crop_ of new students to mould in her image! It would be missing her two prize pupils, but provided they survived, there would be other opportunities to _break them in_. Oh yes: she looked forward to it.

"Here is where we part ways," the young man escorting them spoke up in passable mandarin Chinese. "I can go no further in this form."

Hollow Eyes paid him no heed, heading straight for the shoreline.

"Thanks for the company." Ayabe inclined his head politely. "I'm sure you'll get a ride soon."

"I do hope so," their escort replied. "This body is… squishy and wet. And your insect life keeps biting me. I don't know how you could stand it."

"You'll get used to it," Ayabe concluded with a grin, and a wave of his hand. He, too, headed for the water.

Cologne fell in last, but paused before the young man.

"What is your name, Commander?" she asked.

"My real one?"

She nodded.

"Zraz," he told her. "You are Khu Lon. Will you keep that name?"

"Of course I will!" she answered with a dazzling smile. "Names are important to people, just as they are to your kind. That's why I asked you instead of having the Mind tell me."

Zraz didn't smile back, but she sensed that was mostly due to his unfamiliarity with having quite so many facial muscles. Instead, he held up his right hand.

"Farewell, Commander," Cologne said, dismissing herself.

Zraz watched them from the concrete wall as all four slipped beneath the waves of the North China Sea. They did not swim. They simply walked forward into the lightless deep. He hoped that the male Trenchard had been correct and that The Mind did eventually send someone to pick him up. Unfortunately, it seemed more likely that he would be left to monitor the native human society in the area. So many of their normal human puppets had been removed lately, it left precious little to work with Earthside.

Swatting at his arm, Zraz stared down at the splattered mosquito in his palm. For the life of him, he couldn't see why the Sectoids and their devolved aquatic brethren liked this planet so much. Wiping the bloody remains off on his pant leg, he leisurely walked down along the shore towards the nearest town. About the only thing he'd miss when the hammer finally came down on this planet was the food. Especially this "ice cream" he had developed a sweet tooth for. Human tastes were just so… pronounced and unique! It was a true shame that in his natural state he couldn't enjoy such pleasures.

Recycled biomatter just couldn't compare.

* * *

Ranma acted like nothing was wrong.

In fact, now that she thought about it, he was acting happier and more content than he ever had back in Nerima, either in school or in his free time. First, they went to check on Konatsu, and they each took turns talking to him. 'Engagement' it was called. 'External Stimulation.' Shampoo talked about how she was working to help him and Ranma went on for a while about how they were progressing as a group. Ukyou told him a little about what she'd heard about the new recruits that were due to be transferred. Seeing her friend lying there, she thought about telling him her thoughts on other things, too… later: when they had some privacy.

They then went down to the Armory for refitting.

At the spring in her squad commander's step, Ukyou almost – almost – said something she knew she would later regret. She chalked the irritability up to a mild hangover. Both India and Juliet Squads were off-rotation, but both squad leaders seemed determined to drill their units into the ground. Ukyou didn't mind it that much, but knowing what she now did, Ranma's cheerfulness seemed more and more like a deliberate ruse.

It didn't help that the idea that being with Akane actually made him happy went against her grain. Why did he pretend for so long that he didn't like her only to make a total about-face like this? It seemed so arbitrary and out of the blue. Too much had happened between those two away from prying eyes. Was it possible that they hadn't hated each other, even as far back as a year ago?

Ukyou tried to force the thoughts out of her head.

She had dealt with this last night. She wasn't a bitch; if Ranma was happy with Akane – for whatever insane reason anyone would be happy with a violent tomboy like that – then she'd respect his decision. If, by chance, their little tryst imploded, then that would be a different story. However, until then, she wouldn't let it screw over her life or drive her to do anything stupid. She had trained against the relentless sea and risked death; she wouldn't let teenage heartache break what brutal martial arts training could not. Luckily, after a few minutes, her mood started to lighten.

And then, as if to mock her, they'd all stripped down.

For the last few days, while they were off-rotation, their personal armor had been taken away. It was being upgraded to be vacuum capable, among other things. India and Juliet were both technically classified as "assault squads," but in terms of equipment, they were really more like "light recon." They had no heavy powered armor, no Blaster Bomb attachments, operated without HWPs (heavy weapons platforms) the majority of the time, and didn't carry Heavy Plasma Rifles as standard. Their standard load out consisted of light personal armor, medium plasma rifles, a few heavies carried by Shampoo or Mousse, and several extra stocks of grenades.

India and Juliet had to make up what they lacked in armor with speed.

Rumor was that they (that most squads actually) were being up-armored for the Mars mission. Command expected a Hell of a fight and meant to pull out all the stops. That meant that even the limited supplies of Elerium could be pressed harder than ever before. That had been the rumor trickling through the base anyway.

As a result, the three stood around half naked in a cold room, trying to act casual. Well, two of them tried to act casual. Shampoo's inhibitions seemed to be set three or four notches below normal, and the Chinese girl stretched languidly across one of the large padded seats in the fitting room, splayed out like a sleepy feline. Ukyou envied the other girl in a way. Then again, it was pretty shameless, so it was probably a good thing that she envied Shampoo only "in a way." The Japanese girl kept her arms crossed over her chest, thankful for the undershirt she wore.

Ranma relaxed casually, keeping his eyes on the ceiling. He never had been tempted to take an eyeful of any of the girls that threw themselves at him. Akane called him a pervert, but he was really pretty prudish as far as guys went. If there was anything really perverted about him, it was his family style of martial arts and his tendency to act like a tramp when he pretended to be a girl (for whatever reason, usually to fool Kuno or Ryouga or win a fight). Then again, this was someone raised by Genma. It was a surprise that he didn't flash his girl form's chest at strangers for money.

Watching him closely, she wondered…

The image of a certain red-head and a blue haired Tendo sister entered her mind.

"AAAHH!" Ukyou all but screamed. "Bad thoughts!"

Too late to stop herself totally, Ukyou 'eeped' and covered her mouth with her hands. Sitting by himself, Ranma spared her a curious look. Shampoo just yawned. Ukyou tried to keep from making more of a scene, laughing contritely and inching deeper into her seat. Fortunately, the wall on the east side of the room chirped, and a second later their new suits emerged from small alcoves in the wall.

"These are your new PA-3E Personal Armor Systems," a voice on the Armory intercom sounded. "I had to reset the internal environmental layer on them. They should re-conform after about ten minutes. While you're doing this, we have a video for you to watch."

The three members of Juliet Squad approached their refitted armor, tentatively inspecting it for any major alterations. There was a small instruction booklet attached to a loop of string tied to the right thumb. On first look, there wasn't much of a change from their normal PA-3 FBA type (Full Body Armor) Personal Armor. There were a few more obvious changes: the armor around the forearms had been improved with a solid layer of exotic alloy, in addition to the more familiar disposable ablative plates. The armor scheme on the upper arm was a bit different, too, with some of the plates facing the body removed. The shoulders had a series of interlocking flexible plates rather than the old solid-plate configuration.

Removing the booklet, Ukyou saw Ranma and Shampoo starting to put their suits on. She quickly did the same. Personal Armor was modular and self-sealing; the legs, torso, helmet, left and right arms were all separate components. The lower body came first. Removing that section from where it rested, inlaid with the wall, Ukyou placed it on one of the large seats.

She had done this before.

First she slipped her bare foot into the left boot. It was a bit like squeezing into a ski boot, except that the inner layer had the texture of a slightly damp sponge. Left foot first then right, she pressed down with her heel until she was firmly rooted in place. The armor couldn't be slipped on like normal clothes, though it was a bit similar to putting on very heavy snow pants or the like. She carefully sat down into the exposed section of the legs and lower body. It felt a bit like immersing oneself part way in a pool of water, complete with a small chill that ran up from her lower back to her shoulders.

The rest was intuitive: the frontal sections of the leg armor hinged and snapped into place, alien alloy sockets sealing and rotating closed into a "locked" alignment. Circular bracers at certain points rotated and briefly flashed green, indicating a successful seal. Air hissed out while she stretched her leg, allowing the armored kneepad to depress into place. It felt a bit tight, just like the first time she had worn the armor, but that was what this session was for. The inner environmental layer would conform to her body and readjust to her movements becoming a comfortable body glove.

The waist and groin sections had a small hook and clamp to make aligning them easier, and they snapped into place on the first try. Locks mated with those in the legs and the rear half of the pelvic armor, forming another airtight seal. Ukyou reached for the upper torso armor next: it was designed a little differently.

The torso armor had two sections to it: Section A was put on over the shoulders, and built according to a "clam-shell" design. It was armored but flexible. Ukyou slipped her arms and head through holes in the armor – just like putting on a heavy coat – and eased the torso armor onto her shoulders. In place, she unlocked two safeties on the shoulders and two on the sides. Fitting it snugly in place, she looped two cords from the pelvic armor into reader slots in the upper torso. These were critical electronic leads as well as contact points for the armor's sealing locks.

Only with that done did she disengage the last lock, turn it ninety degrees, and press in. The clam-shell armor tightened, pressing in on her and bolting into place with the lower body section. The locks on her shoulders and sides whirred closed, and with another hiss of air, the environmental layer compressed and sealed. It was all designed to be redundant; so critical damage to one leg, for example, would not cause a loss of environmental containment beyond that immediate area.

The arm mounted armor came next, before the second torso layer. Sliding her arm through the thick solid loop that was the upper arm band, Ukyou locked the shoulder joint attachment into place and wound a loose loop of armor – little more than the environmental layers – around and under her arm pit, fitting the ends of it into place at two points before and after the main shoulder seal. Each one gave an affirming 'click' to indicate they were properly in place.

The forearm armor was another clam-shell design that champed, all in one section, over her arm. A sheath extended over her hand and fingers from the forearm section. With everything else in place, she unlocked the hand guard and finger plates from the forearm with a sound like ripping Velcro. The exotic alloy plates fitted into small groves in the body glove over her left hand, also clicking into place. She then activated the hermetic seal on the shoulder junction, and the whole thing tightened, conforming to her body. The right arm went the same way.

Last but not least came the second section of the torso: Section B, the "Solid" Layer. These Ukyou put on like the accessories they were, and it was here that she noticed some changes to her PA-3 that she hadn't seen before. By this time, her attention was on a screen built into the wall. It was displaying some of the new features and changes, and informing them of adjustments to the armoring process. There had been a few additions and modifications to the Solid Armor section of the PA-3.

A new flexible plate weave had belts holding it in place around her abdomen. A solid loop of exotic alloy armor fitted around her waist, and another around her chest. Modular shoulder plates locked into place over the junction between her arm and the upper torso armored body glove. Additional protective plates, consisting of ablative disposable panels and a solid inner layer, helped cover her outer thighs and shins. It was a heavier, more comprehensive armoring than before.

The video described some of the new features.

Research and Development had compiled data from fire fights with the aliens and determined the more statistically likely areas to come under different forms of enemy fire. Certain areas were statistically more likely to be hit by direct plasma fire, others by explosive damage and shrapnel. Some sections of armor had been reduced and others strengthened. Additionally, many of the extra armor plates incorporated a new micro-folding process that weaved the alien alloy into very tightly packed ridges. It was like folding a piece of paper into a fan. The new plates were only about twenty percent thicker, but the protective properties were supposed to be almost twice that of those previous.

There were other new features as well. The integrated psi-amp had been moved and spread out within the suit's imbedded circuitry to prevent a lucky shot from disabling it. The inner environmental layer had been strengthened to prevent instantaneous decompression even in the event of a plasma strike. The suit also had two added pockets for replacement exotic alloy plates, allowing a soldier more field independence and some ability to replace damaged sections of armor. Ukyou listened intently as it outlined procedures for safely and quickly ejecting and replacing damaged armor panels.

Finally, two totally new additions had been made. The first was a system of powered synthetic muscles built into the second environmental layer. This layer was the one that normally handled power channeling: it was a complex mesh of fiber-optic cable and power lines. The video outlined the arrangement of the synthetic muscles in complete full body armor. Ukyou hadn't even noticed them.

According to the demo, the muscles themselves were an arrangement of alien alloy memory metal cables. The armor itself picked up on normal muscle movement and configured the cables to expand or contract as required. The systems were supposed to aid in adverse gravity maneuvering and reduce long term fatigue on extended operations. The armor had an expanded Elerium-115 power supply to compensate for this system and the additional weight of armor, both flexible and solid plate. In essence, the PA-3 had been upgraded to a light Powered Armor.

This fact was reinforced by what they were expected to carry.

On-Earth engagements had never required extensive air supplies for UNETCO's soldiers, but the new PA-3 upgrade was expected to carry a cycling air supply with it into battle. Their new backpacks were larger than before but much of the space was taken up by the integrated breathing apparatus; in fact, they had less room in their packs than before. To compensate, additional pockets and equipment clamps had been added to the rest of the armor.

The video went in depth about the new atmospheric apparatus they would be carrying, but the chemistry went completely over Ukyou's head. The basics of it seemed to be that they didn't have a normal pressurized O2 system like a diver or even an astronaut. Due to combat conditions in hard vacuum or low atmosphere, UNETCO had devised a "partial solid state" "closed circuit breathing apparatus" that recycled and partly regenerated breathable levels of oxygen. The so called "white box" they were to carry contained a semi-solid that actively exchanged oxygen for carbon dioxide, maintaining set levels of pressurized oxygen in a breathable mixture of gasses and _perfluorohexane_ vapors.

The swirl of equations describing the transfer of molecules wasn't something she expected to understand, but luckily, the video codified and repeated the most important information. They could adjust their levels of oxygen and other gasses or allow the computer to handle it. The system was armored around the White Box and wouldn't explode if it was breached, but some of the gas transfer tubes were vulnerable (if one got unlucky enough) and in the event of failure, there was only a small twenty minute reserve of pressurized O2. They had both a primary and secondary pair of breathing tubes in case of emergency, and one universal blow off and control valve with both an electronic and manual control. Under combat conditions, they could expect to have roughly six hours of air. The "White Box" itself could be easily detached and replaced in under thirty seconds.

"Familiarize yourself with your new armor and it **will** get you home safely," the video's narrator concluded. "Any further inquiries can be directed towards regional engineering representatives or your quartermaster. If you encounter a system error that can not be fixed by a diagnostic, it is recommended that you remove your armor **immediately** and **entirely**."

That last bit left a long silence in its wake.

"Well!" Ranma chuckled at the warning. "What are the chances of that happening anyway? Let's sign these babies out, strap on the gravs, and take these suits for a test run!"

"Sir!" the two women responded crisply. "Yes, sir!"

'Jinx us, why don't you, Ran-chan?' Ukyou couldn't help but think. Did Ranma literally have to look and ask for trouble at every opportunity?

She rotated her arms; the suit had already conformed and reset to the curves of her body, hugging her like a second skin. The initial chill of the innermost layer had warmed to body temperature, and the tight squeeze from before had become a comfortable fit. It was hard to believe that she was wearing over fifty pounds of armor; it was so easily and evenly distributed across her body!

Mars.

She couldn't help but wonder what it would be like. Soon the three of them were outside and starting on their morning forty, breathing the new mix of air and odorless chemicals that would sustain them when they left Earth and running under an altered alien gravity. Following Ranma, Ukyou felt more and more that she had been right. Ranma was important to her, very important, but she could and would move on with her life.

'Today,' she thought, more sure than ever. In fact, she was almost looking forward to it.

'Today is the day things change!'

As it turned out, Ukyou was more right than she could have guessed.

* * *

Author's Notes:

Yes, the last part of this chapter is a bit short, since I didn't want to cut the Ryouga/Ukyou scene in half. Typically, every chapter is divided into 3 parts, each about 6k words or so. This chapter just didn't split itself up as easily as most.

Anyway, I'm going to be focusing on a lot of character issues for another chapter or two. I'll try and squeeze in action bits where relevant (including parts of the missed fights back at the alien base) but for the most part the chapters will focus on the NWC and some of their personal issues and ambitions. Hope nobody minds! It can't be action all the time, and it isn't like I'm writing for the Master Chief or anything. These kids have a lot of baggage from Nerima and from their unconventional lives that have to be worked through. My goal has always been to portray them not only as the skilled fighters that they are, but also as young adults, with insecurities and failings and all that good stuff a lot of us probably remember from our late teens.

Thanks to everyone who reads and reviews and for putting p with my updating delays!


	94. New Beginnings I

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. In late December of 2006, the two newly formed martial arts assault squads, India and Juliet, participated in the elimination of the last major alien base on Earth. With this bastion removed, the Sirius Conspiracy crushed, and the loss of the Joketsuzoku village avenged, only one great obstacle remains: the alien command center on Cydonia, Mars. Only then can Earth be safe. With that great battle looming ahead of them, India and Juliet also look inward to their individual hopes and dreams. This is their story.

* * *

**From**: Lt. Saotome Ranma  
**Sent**: Wednesday, December 22, 2006, 06:05  
**To**: Lt. Hibiki Ryouga  
**Subject**: Re: Akane

You gotta be kidding man! You're seriously going to do this now?

Fine. Go ahead. Your funeral.

Actually maybe this is for the best. She'll only get madder the more we put this off. Thanks for at least giving me a little warning. I'll be sure to be otherwise occupied this afternoon, if ya know what I mean. Avoidance is also one of a martial artist's skills! I got some stuff of my own to see to this afternoon anyway.

-RS

Oh, and what's this about some new technique that we can all use? Been working on something special behind my back, huh? Sounds interesting! Keep me in the loop, man!

* * *

"Martial Arts Calligraphy?"

Cologne reflected on her new guest this morning. Shampoo was not the only visitor she received in her humble containment cell. Both of her male students, and even that blind fool, Mousse, had come to check in on her before. This was Ryouga's first visit that was entirely professional. The young man sat on the floor across from her, three folders of documents and research material strewn around him.

He had just finished retelling his story: the story of the Mark of the Gods.

"Is it familiar to you, Granny?" he asked, using the overly familiar nickname. Cologne smiled at it; the lost boy was more respectful than Ranma and Mousse tended to be. 'Granny' was a kinder familiarity than 'old ghoul' by a fair margin. He wore the same basic type of uniform Cologne had seen Shampoo and the others in so often, except with a different western-style rank symbol.

"The hermit's name," she spoke up, taking a deep breath. "What was it?"

"Shigenosuke of the Kimen School. I never learned much more than that."

"I thought so," Cologne replied, pouring herself a cup of tea. It had been very kind of the lost boy to bring some. The amenities in Alien Confinement did leave much to be desired, especially for an old woman of her age and delicacy.

"You already know some of his story," she continued. "Our village never had contact with any actual martial arts calligraphy masters. Contrary to what you may think, all of us old folks don't necessarily know each other from back in the day. I never met this Shigenosuke myself."

Ryouga's expression darkened a bit with dejection.

"I do know **of** him, however," the Amazon elder added, bolstering his spirits somewhat. "When I was young, I heard of a Japanese man who caused a schism within his strange school of martial arts. As you know, martial arts calligraphy is a style that means to infuse the spirit and body with strength and discipline through precise, ordered, and artistic forms. These were expressed externally and strictly practiced through the art of calligraphy itself."

The concept was not as farfetched as it first appeared. Masterful calligraphy even under ideal conditions required fine motor control, much preparation, and mental focus. These were all traits shared with martial arts. When the object was to disrupt another's technique, successful application of martial arts calligraphy required resourcefulness, the ability to plan steps ahead, the speed and precise control to make strokes under adverse conditions, and the creativity to attack and defend at the same time, all while accomplishing an objective.

In other words, calligraphy became an allegory for war.

"Shigenosuke was a radical. He believed that the art of calligraphy could be used more directly. He traveled the world, studying foreign arts: tribal tattoos from the South Seas, war paint from ancient Europe and Africa, and the writings of the Near East. He refined his art and returned to Japan, only to be deemed an outcast and a heretic by his school."

Sadly, it was a common story. Cologne knew all too well how old masters became entrenched in their ways and resistant to change, especially when it directly challenged the worldview they had devoted so many decades of their lives to. It was the inevitable fate of true geniuses to forge their own destinies and to go against the proverbial grain. Cologne knew first hand that many suffered for it.

As Perfume had, years ago.

"After that, the story is vague."

"The others," Ryouga filled in from there. "The ones I contacted in the surviving school say that he tried to create a branch of the art, but something went wrong. Shigenosuke went into self imposed exile. No one heard from him in half a century."

"Until you stumbled into him in the mountains," Cologne said, nodding sagely at the twist of fate, "No doubt an example of your rather unique direction sense at work."

Ryouga let out a loud 'hrumph' He obviously saw it differently. Cologne almost reproached the young man. How many strange martial arts masters had he just 'bumped into' at just the right moment over the last couple years? How many unusual techniques had he picked up? How often had he appeared just in time to save someone, or alternatively, to thwart someone else? If he truly simply "got lost" then the chances of these things occurring would be miniscule. Cologne, old as she was, did not believe in simple coincidence.

Was the Hibiki sense of direction drawn to danger?

Or was it drawn to opportunity?

The two were very easily mistaken.

"Which brings us to the Mark of the Gods and your little adventure with Ranma in removing it," Cologne said, skipping to the main point of her guest's visit. He wasn't here to sip tea and reminisce, after all.

"From your description, it worked as advertised," she added. "You became quite formidable."

"Ranma was nothing to me," he answered, but his voice was tinged with regret of his own. For another man, it would probably have been a proud moment: standing untouched, invincible, with one's hated rival beaten and at the mercy of his better. Many people - like Pantyhose Taro, Herb, Saffron, even Mousse or Shampoo – would have probably used their great power to destroy their enemy then and there.

"You could have killed him," Cologne stated.

"Yes. I suppose I could have," Ryouga admitted, settling his chin into his right hand, elbow propped against his knee. "Not that there would have been any point. Beating Ranma like that wasn't… isn't what I want."

"You gave up this power…" The ancient Amazon took another sip of hot tea. "It isn't something many would do."

"Hm." Ryouga made another depreciating huff. "Wouldn't you?"

Cologne smiled brightly at the compliment. "I'm flattered that you think I would. In truth, no one can answer that question honestly. The allure of power is hard to resist, even for the best of us."

"It didn't help that the thing looked so stupid," Ryouga replied, deadpan and serious, tapping his fingers against his brow line, "I mean, couldn't it have been a dragon or something? Like a dragon coiling around a skull – a flaming skull! – with a tiger in its mouth? Something like that?"

Cologne just stared at him.

"What?" he asked suddenly self conscious.

"I'll take your word for it, sonny."

"It was just an example…"

"Regardless," Cologne interrupted and raised her one remaining hand to signal their moving on. "It seems that you have not entirely turned your back on this Mark of the Gods. Tell me: do you really intend to use it now, after all this time?"

"I… do," Ryouga replied, but he sounded far from certain. "I just want to be sure it works. I've tried to recreate it based on what the old man used on me and the notes UNETCO acquired from the other calligraphy school. I think I've got it, but… I just want to be sure."

"It seems your uncertainty is rooted in more than just your ability to execute this technique."

The lost one ran a hand through his hair.

"This isn't just for me," he tried to explain his rationale. "Konatsu is hurt, and people died because we weren't strong enough. What if someone else dies in the next mission? Or the one after that? We all have to become more than we currently are, and this is the surest way to do it! If we all had this Mark, Granny, we'd be unstoppable!"

"Would you?" she asked, rhetorically. "Were you unstoppable when you had it?"

"Mostly," was his answer, "I mean, it had a weakness, but…"

Cologne cocked her head, silently asking him to go on.

Instead, he lowered his head. When he continued, his voice was more subdued, "One little weakness. But you can't deny we'd be stronger than we are now."

Cologne put down her tea cup and folded her hand over her lap.

"A long time ago in China, one of our Elders, Bra Shu, created a powerful artifact. She was a powerful woman with a great deal of potential, and in her hands, the artifact made her almost invincible. She picked fights that she knew she could win, and even led a campaign against the Musk. She won many battles and duels and with each one her acclaim grew."

Cologne continued, "In each one, she used her artifact, which she took to calling Bra Shu's Glory. Finally, she confronted the Lord of the Musk himself. This was the great, great grandfather of the Herb you know. Like all his line, he was also named Herb. He found a way to counter Bra Shu's Glory after watching her use it, and when he took it from her, Bra Shu became helpless before him. Herb's guards seized her and took her away as they did many of our sisters in that battle. The Musk still have her artifact, though it may or may not still work without its maker. Their name for it, which we soon also adopted, was not Bra Shu's Glory."

Cologne could see that her guest already guessed the point of this story.

"It was Bra Shu's Folly," she concluded.

When Ryouga didn't reply, she explained her thoughts on the matter.

"As Matriarch, I know much of the artifacts our people created or collected over our long history. A seat on the Nyūchezū Council of Elders was always reserved for one who could preside over the Forbidden Arsenal. Fa Nu, 'Fan,' was our last Elder to hold that position. She believed, as I do, that it was best for some techniques and some artifacts to remain Forbidden, not just because of their danger, but because they encouraged spiritual apathy and decay."

"As martial artists, we use tools in our Art," she pointed out, lecturing now. "That young okonomiyaki chef uses her spatulas; Shampoo is similarly capable of using a great many weapons. You have your Iron Cloth, and Mousse's entire fighting style depends on the various things hidden on his person. These weapons all have advantages and handicaps, but there is a difference between them and what you have here."

She jabbed a bony finger at the carefully outlined smiley face on the paper before her.

"You know exactly what I mean," she remarked, setting her hand back down on her leg. "Even Mousse can throw his weapons away and fight with something else. However, the man or woman who uses this tattoo will be bound to it. Physically, they may become the strongest and fastest martial artist alive, but spiritually, they will be empty. This strength, potent as it may be, is false and hollow to the core. It is a short cut that provides power now and nothing later."

Having finished to her satisfaction, she watched the lost boy carefully. She knew he had to feel the same way. He had rejected the Mark for just that reason. Deep down, he understood that it wasn't how a true martial artist gained power. This particular technique was taboo for good reason.

A Mark that gave you the power of a God?

Cologne was disgusted by the very idea. One could not mass produce art! One could not engineer a masterpiece on a factory floor or on a copy machine. True mastery, true power, came from the eternal uphill struggle for superiority and survival. It was a long, virtually endless staircase to the top of a mountain, to a peak that no man or woman could reach. Perfection was a meaningless word. What was it worth, balanced against adversity and determination?

Ryouga sat opposite her, taciturn and surrounded by his taboo research. He said nothing, and even his face was hidden by his dark black hair. Cologne could see past that, into his very aura. He knew full well what this technique was, and he wanted an excuse not to use it. She only hoped that she'd given him what he wanted from this meeting.

"That," he finally said. "That's irrelevant. Will it work?"

He slid the paper forward.

"Will it work, Granny?" he asked again.

Cologne sighed.

No one could say she hadn't tried.

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia  
**Chapter XXXII  
_New Beginnings_

* * *

Written by:  
Capn Chryssalid

* * *

"Working hard?"

Shampoo turned her head to see an unexpected guest. Of course, Kasumi had every right to be in the base's medical areas – she worked there after all, so really it was Shampoo who was the unexpected guest in the older girl's domain. Still, Shampoo knew she had probably spent at least four or five hours in here over the last two days working on Konatsu's situation and she hadn't probably only seen a couple glances of the Tendo sister in that time.

Now, she stood next to Konatsu, carefully looking over his body. The "legendary kunoichi" was out of stasis and lying flat on a reinforced medical bed hooked up to general life support. Additionally, a series of needles now stuck out from an assortment of pressure points on his body. Shampoo knew there were currently twenty one in all; she was the one who had put them there after all. Many also had small paper tags attached with her personal hand written notes on them describing the point, its significance, and the series of pressure points it was a part of.

"I wonder if he's dreaming," Kasumi said, gently running a finger by the needle sticking out just behind and above the zygomatic arch, above the right cheek. A nearby electrode fed into a silent EEG machine.

"He isn't," Shampoo corrected her. Not for the first time, she was glad to be able to converse intelligently in English. Japanese was just so… hard! It still frustrated her that she spoke like an idiot in that language; especially since Mousse had picked it up so readily.

"Technically, he's in a state of very light sleep," she explained. "The technique used on him was… well, it's complicated."

Kasumi nodded sadly.

"It… it was Doctor Tofu," she asked. "Wasn't it?"

Shampoo sat uncomfortably in her chair. While she wasn't a regular in that affair back in Nerima, she knew about Kasumi and the good doctor. She had worked under Tofu for over a month at his clinic, and she had seen the way he lost his senses when Kasumi dropped by. Even the mention of the Tendo sister could drive the man into mushy incoherence. His feelings on the matter were obvious, but Kasumi's were more mysterious. Were they reciprocated, or did she just see him as a good friend?

Either way, Kasumi probably deserved an answer.

"It was," Shampoo confirmed. It didn't matter how Kasumi had figured that out, or if she had simply guessed. Who else could do this to a man? Shampoo suddenly wondered if it would have been more polite to tack on an apology after telling the other girl that her old friend was the enemy who had nearly killed one of their own?

"I know something happened to him, when those creatures… took him. He's probably so confused and hurt that he doesn't know what he's doing anymore," Kasumi thought out loud.

Shampoo had to bite back a retort. To her, Tofu's current nature was anything but "hurt and confused."

"At least," Kasumi continued. "That's what I tell myself. I just can't bear the thought of him as one of them."

"They are as close to evil as I've ever seen," Shampoo replied, hoping she sounded at least a little sympathetic. This sort of stuff wasn't her forte. "They take the best of us and they twist it. That's all they do. That's all they are."

"Shampoo," Kasumi began, taking a few seconds to compose her thoughts. "Do you think… that next time… you could bring him back? That he could be saved, like your great grandmother?"

The Amazon wanted to tell her 'yes' – that he could be saved and that he would be. She wanted to even though she knew it would be a lie. Cologne was a special case, since her mind had been copied at the moment she broke under the alien's will. Tofu was probably as irredeemable as either Cologne's clone or that Ayabe man. Shampoo had seen with her own eyes how far-gone the man's transformation was. There wasn't much human left in him anymore.

"Maybe," she half-lied. It was unlikely, but there was always hope.

Kasumi seemed to already know what that answer really meant.

"Thank you, Shampoo," Kasumi politely responded.

"Were you…" The younger girl hesitated for a second, but pressed forward with the question. It felt like the time, and she was curious. "Were you two… together?"

Kasumi sighed softly and sat down in a chair opposite Shampoo, with Konatsu between them. The elder Tendo sister always wore a contented or at least forbearing smile; Shampoo couldn't remember ever seeing her frown or scowl or even look distressed. At the worst, she was uncomfortable, but even then only under truly trying conditions. Even now, Kasumi wore a forlorn expression replete with the barest hint of a smile. Perhaps, Shampoo guessed, she was remembering better times?

"I know he felt very strongly for me," Kasumi admitted, an inkling of guilt to her voice. "He was always very kind, and I had known him since I was a little girl. He was a good man, but… very private. When I was your age, I thought he would approach father about arranging something, but he never did. I don't know why."

"Men are stupid," Shampoo explained with sage-like advice. "Who knows why they do anything?" Then she gave the still unconscious Konatsu a strange look. "This one, too. He wouldn't be in this mess if he hadn't acted like such a dumb male."

Kasumi also looked over at the poor boy. "Do you mind if I ask what happened?"

"There isn't much to say," Shampoo began, but told her anyway.

--

Doctor Tofu wasn't breathing. It was eerie to watch him, even after so much dodging and counterattacking, stand there and not even be short of breath. Just the opposite; if he was breathing, it was calmly and through his nose. A long tear in his alien habit revealed a collection of coarse almost-blue flesh of the sort one would see on a frostbitten corpse dug up after an avalanche. He had taken a bad hit there from one of Ryu's attacks but no more than a few drops of dark red blood stained his clothes.

With a thunderous crash, Lime landed, wielding a massive weapon in one hand. The Musk was inhumanly strong, even by the standards of superhuman martial artists. His armor was heavier than that of anyone else in the hangar, and his current weapon of choice was truly a Big Fucking Gun. Someone had apparently had the smart idea of equipping the man with a refitted plasma cannon of the sort normally reserved for HWPs. Unlike the Gatling gun, Lime had been more sparing with his shots implying that even he only carried a limited supply of ammunition for the beast.

"Quit moving around!" The Musk warrior roared, immediately opening fire. A green lance of plasma erupted with the fury and force of a solar flare, slashing into the spot where Tofu had just been standing. Alien alloys, under such extreme heat, didn't properly melt. Instead they shattered like a glass, spraying superheated gas and crystal in every direction.

Tofu moved like a ghost, appearing behind the large Musk fighter, only to have to duck and flip out of the way as Ryu defended the bigger man's flank. India Squad's demolitions man slashed his arms, unleashing a fan of vacuum blades and following up with a half of clip of weapons fire from his sidearm. From the side, Konatsu joined in, dashing at speeds an Olympic runner would envy while unloading from another salvo from his plasma pistol.

"Got ya!" Ukyou yelled, swinging her battle spatula just as Tofu jumped, trying to avoid the barrage. It was only the briefest of moments, but he was helpless and unable to dodge. The one time chef twisted the weapon in her hands, aiming to drive the sharpened edge of the blade into the Doctor's belly.

Tofu's arm snaked out at an odd angle, palm facing the incoming blade.

Ukyou let out a surprised squeak as a telekinetic push sent it flying off course with her still holding on. She spun wildly through the air, managing to only get off a trio of thrown spatulas. Tofu caught them in midair with one hand as he used another telekinetic push to shoot himself out of the way of another incoming wave of green plasmatic death.

He landed and immediately twirled around, throwing Ukyou's weapons at Shampoo. The Amazon barely dodged; she had been trying to line up a clean shot, but Tofu was so fast and erratic. One of the secrets had been revealed in the flurry of combat: he had something like an Ethereal's telekinesis, allowing him unnatural mobility in the air. This meant that he could maneuver without respect to momentum, balance or general inertia.

"We need to pin him down!" Shampoo heard Ryu over the team-com.

"I volunteer," Konatsu immediately replied. "I'm the only one who can use replacements in close combat."

"You're not going in alone. We'll both do it," Ryu decided for them. No one argued. "Lime: cover us! Shampoo, Ukyou, take the shot."

"Right!" "Yes!"

"Go!"

The two boys charged in towards the corrupted Doctor Tofu. Flushed out of one position by Lime's plasma cannon fire, Tofu abruptly changed direction, heading towards the two incoming martial artists. Shampoo observed the clash carefully: watching, waiting, knowing Ukyou was still getting into position. Ryu and Konatsu dashed back and forth, their paths crisscrossing and using the other to hide their attacks.

A plasma blast nicked Tofu, blasting a chunk out of his shoulder that sent bits of blood and flesh burning in the air. Shampoo caught her breath – that one had been so close! Konatsu closed first, pirouetting around Tofu as his hands, both of them, unleashed a torrent of paper. Ryu flipping over the melee, arms and legs slashing as he fired vacuum blades down and into the storm.

Tofu had a very small window of escape, but rather than take it, something struck up and into the air. It seemed impossible, but it was a foot. A human foot. With blinding speed, it tagged Ryu on the leg in two spots. The _Yamasenken_ master cursed and painfully crashed to the ground, unable to land on just one leg from the angle he'd been on.

Konatsu, meanwhile, disappeared in a cloud of smoke. Shampoo could see the real him emerged from it, roll out to the side, and jab up with a bladed weapon. He was fast, but still not fast enough. The foot came down, and Konatsu tried to block. The limb abruptly stopped, and a second later Konatsu was in the air. As the smoke cleared, Shampoo could see Tofu, his leg at a strange angle, but his body was still a blur.

"I won't fail!" Konatsu yelled, and they all heard him. It was then that he did it: instead of jumping away and trying again, he dove right for Tofu. Grabbing the man's outstretched leg, and wrapping one of his arms in wire, the ninja boy finally managed to pin their elusive quarry and spin him around so the _shinobi_ was at his back. It should have been a safe enough place.

But then Tofu's other hand, his entire other arm, twisted around in its socket. Like a disjoined contortionist, Tofu's left arm literally spun around in its joints, the hand jabbing at Konatsu. Still, he held on, and a second later, Tofu's body jerked. Shampoo cursed; she had been aiming for his head, but the doctor had warped his body enough to get a hand up and in the way. The laser tore through flesh and bone and even cut into part of the alien fabric around Tofu's head.

But it just barely missed.

Ukyou's battle spatula flew in, landing between Konatsu and his opponent. Ukyou was already standing on the hilt, and as it fell to the side she spread one arm down and fired a point blank _hinode_. A blinding flask of light engulfed Tofu, but a moment later, the okonomiyaki chef found herself on the ground. Tofu stood, smoking and missing most of his right hand, his foot on her chest.

What he would have done from there, Shampoo could only guess. Her next shot just hit his back, and then Lime was in the mix, howling as he tossed a giant plate of alien alloy like a discus. It sliced through the air just above Ukyou's prone form, forcing Tofu to jump to avoid being cut in half. It had an effect on the girl it had saved, too.

"Holy shit!" Ukyou cursed, flattened out against the ground.

"Where is he?!" Shampoo yelled, searching with the sights of her rifle.

"You shot off my hand."

Behind her!

Shampoo spun around, fired, and jumped away just as she felt something hard and sharp – like a pinprick – jab into the skin of her arm. Even through the armor, Tofu was somehow able to use pressure point strikes. He was… he was a monster! Landing on her feet, Shampoo could see him, just standing there.

His face was inhuman; the blackened, scarred eye sockets looked almost like he had gouged out his eyes with his own hands. The fingers on his one remaining arm seemed unnaturally long, more like claws than anything. The ripped, burned, and blasted Ethereal's robe he wore curled and roiled around him like a cloak of orange and red flame.

"Well," he continued. "One hand isn't so bad. Five fingers and ten toes are more than enough to deal with you children."

--

Kasumi could see Shampoo's face whiten as she finished describing the fight. It was… graphic. The older girl knew she probably didn't look much better. The Tofu that Shampoo described was nothing like the kind man she knew. In all her years knowing him, Kasumi had never seen him even raise his voice in anger.

She knew he wasn't perfect. Tofu, like many men, worked so hard to prove himself… and to prove that his _practice_ was legitimate. She knew how silently frustrated and unhappy he could sometimes be when he talked about how he only had elderly patients to look after, and how his peers in the medical community thought so little of his brand of holistic and alternative medicine. At those times, he said, he was always happiest that she came by to brighten his day.

_"Kasumi!" she remembered him saying, his face lighting up even as his glasses misted over. "How nice to see you!"_

How could her dear friend have become the monster Shampoo described?

"It… it isn't him anymore," Shampoo concluded, voice grave. "There's too much of them inside him."

Kasumi's pained silence spoke volumes.

Shampoo noticed, and adjusted her tone to sound more conciliatory. "Sorry, I… I probably just made you feel worse."

"No," Kasumi replied, even though it was true: she did feel worse. "Thank you… for telling me."

Shampoo looked away from the older girl, unsure what to say.

"Konatsu," Kasumi said, changing the topic for both their sakes. "I think what he did was very brave."

"Very stupid," Shampoo grumbled. "He knew he couldn't fight that man in close. Not for very long."

Between them, Konatsu breathed quietly, his chest rising and falling with a steady rhythm. Kasumi appraised the boy: he did seem physically fine. The problem was inside, under the surface, where no one could see. She thought back to the others she had seen in similar fates, those poor men and women who had been on the losing end of psionic attacks. With all her heart, she hoped something, anything, could be done to help them.

"Do you think you can bring him back?" Kasumi dared to ask. It was the question more than a few skeptical doctors had been asking in the medical center of Seiran Mountain.

Shampoo slowly nodded. "I think so."

Kasumi's mood lightened considerably. "Really!"

"With great grandmother's help we identified the problem," Shampoo said, now giving the unconscious Konatsu her full attention. "But fixing it is harder. I think I've found a way, but… but I'm not sure. I'll need some help to do it, and if something goes wrong…"

"What?"

Shampoo bit her lower lip. "If anything goes wrong, he'll die."

Kasumi touched the Amazon's shoulder, offering comfort and assurance.

"I have faith in you," she said, simply. "We all do."

The older woman could see Shampoo took the praise but didn't let any of it go to her head. She had been through a lot, but it was good to see her working so hard to help someone she hadn't even met until they came here. The fact of the matter was that they – the people under this mountain – were all they had left now. Shampoo had never had anyone except her village, Cologne, Mousse and Ranma. Kasumi had sometimes worried about how the Chinese girl was doing in Japan, especially with that atrocious speech problem she had and her somewhat anti-social demeanor.

"I can do it," the younger girl spoke with determination. "I won't let a comrade die!"

Kasumi forced a smile on her face, buoyed by Shampoo's words. They had lost so much; lost precious people they would never forget but they had found new ones, too. Shampoo would save her friend.

Kasumi was sure of it.

* * *

Doctor Tofu glared at the three missing fingers of his right hand: most of the hand itself had been burned clean off leaving him with a shriveled husk and a barely functional thumb and index finger. But it was of little consequence in the long run. The body was, by its nature, frail and weak. In time he would overcome all those inherited frailties. This little injury would not inconvenience him for long.

In the meantime, he basked in the glow of The Mind.

Yes: this was what he had yearned for, to be a part of something so much greater than himself, so much greater than the limitations of human science and society. All was well in the totality of The Mind. Human trappings like love, joy, shame and sorrow were not anathema. They simply paled in comparison to the purpose that suffused and guided him. Neither Cologne nor Ayabe truly understood how fortunate they both were to be among the select few.

The other Trenchards were more like him: they understood.

Finally, he was where he truly belonged.

Floating nearby, Hollow Eyes and another Ethereal said nothing. When not active, Ethereals entered a form of suspended animation that could last for centuries. They did not sleep. They merely chose to efficiently function as either active or inactive. It was… admirable. Humans could achieve such a state as well, if they worked hard enough. Other Trenchards had come close, but Tofu would become perfect. He would become everything that was expected of him and more.

Sitting on the floor, Cologne grumpily worked on fixing her skin so reflect the flawless complexion she so adored. When would she learn, he wondered? Ayabe, meanwhile, relaxed against a wall, legs crossed and tapping his index finger against his knee. That one was simply ignorant, Tofu decided, but he would cease clinging to human affections and mannerisms in time. Cydonia would be what they both needed to finally cast aside the remnants of their anachronistic vanity.

In the mean time, they waited.

The long walk along the ocean floor had been a unique experience. The darkness of the night had nothing on the lightless depths of the sea. Sea creatures had naturally shied away from them, making the trip uneventful in that respect, but the experience of going hours without a breath had been truly invigorating. Only the perfect vacuum of space could be more refreshing! Truly, this was what it meant to surpass the limitations of a "human!"

Secure now in the long submerged large scout, they had only to bide their time. Very soon, they would have their opportunity to scoot off planet, shooting up from the depths of the ocean and into space. Their pilot had suspended himself here, just in case of emergency, for almost a year. Compared to that, a little patience on their part was hardly a lot to ask for. Still.

Soon.

Very soon!

* * *


	95. New Beginnings II

"I see only a few familiar strokes in this one. These look like two Yangqin Hooks. The inverted Pecking Slants on the sides act as focusing points for the abdominal chakra points. These three points look like they create a triangular nexus around the Manipura. What I don't understand is why the Mark would redirect energy from the Muladhara and Svadisthana to the sides like this."

Cologne examined the calligraphy diagram carefully. It was very strange, now that she had taken the time to look at it in depth. Naturally, martial arts calligraphy was very different in approach than the arts she was familiar with from the village, but there seemed to be a few theoretical similarities. It shouldn't have seemed so foreign, so alien, to her sensibilities. She and her wayward pupil had been reviewing much what he had learned and worked on over the last month in the subject, but this last diagram, the third and newest version of his "Mark of the Gods," was truly a strange.

"I think it has something to do with maintaining a yin/yang state," Ryouga theorized, discretely interrupting her and pointing to two notations on the side of the page. "Tsewang used a similar principle to isolate yin and yang around the Manipura using deep meditation."

"Tsewang used circles. Circular motion," Cologne corrected him, and pointed to the two extremes of the stupid looking smiley face. "This Mark is designed around an oval. It must be using four overlapping circles, here, here, here and here."

"I don't think it's an oval, though." Ryouga looked up at her, a hint of mischief in his eyes at knowing something she didn't. "I think it's an _ellipse_."

For once, Cologne was a bit stumped. While a knowledge of geometry was important for the sort of sealing techniques the Amazons used, like the Demon Seal, it was an art based on perfect circles, triangles, and the symmetry of the human body. She had never heard of an ellipse based _chakra_ or _ki_ seal. It was as foreign as… making wontons out of turkey or building a house out of paper. Sure, it could be done, but it just wasn't.

"When I did the math, the exact center of the… of the _eyes_… were also the focus points of the ellipse, and where the two circles intersected with the major axis they formed another ellipse!"

He pulled out another piece of paper and superimposed it over the other one of the Mark of the Gods version III. This paper displayed an ellipse on an axis with two circles centered on the foci; these were the two points on either side of the center where the sum of the distances from any point was constant and equal to the major diameter. Over that were added two more ellipses, one connected from the inner facing of the left circle and the outer facing of the right where they intersected with the major axis. The other ellipse was its opposite, bound by the outer facing of the left circle and the inner facing of the right.

It matched the 'face' of the Mark of the Gods perfectly.

"When I discovered that he had to be using ellipses as the base of the design instead of circles or triangles, I was baffled. No one else used ellipses like this in any school I knew of. Everyone I contacted about it told me that I had to be wrong and that the design needed to use circles or it would become unstable." Ryouga snapped his fingers, as if the flash of insight had come to him now instead of then.

"That's when I asked some of the tech heads around here," he said, and Cologne knew he had to be referring to some of the western educated scientists on the base. "I had a friend run the diagram through a computer simulation, and it proved that the basic seal in the Mark of the Gods wasn't a circle."

The lost boy traced his fingers along the inner ellipses, index fingers moving in a rough orbit opposite each other.

"It resembled something called a 'two body rotation' with two equal masses orbiting a common point. That point, a barycenter or center of mass, is right on top of the Manipura. I think the Mark converts yin and yang from the typical circular motion into a two body rotation around the Manipura chakra point."

Cologne pondered this; it was a peculiar concept. It was generally accepted within the village's martial art tradition that the rotation of yin and yang within the body, generated at different chakra points, produced usable _qi_ (or _ki_). It was like a dynamo, or for a less technical example, it was akin to a crank. The perfect rotation of the two opposing forces (the yin and yang) turned the crank (representing the balance of the chakra points), producing a force that could then be used (the _ki_). This was generally thought to be like two circles moving around a central point.

If Ryouga was right, then the Mark of the Gods…

"I see," Cologne said, studying the diagrams intently. "No wonder Shigenosuke was rejected by his school. No wonder he was called a heretic! It wasn't just his techniques. If the Mark works like you describe, if this **man** was correct… then the elliptical circulation of energy around a point may well be the more efficient state! It may even be the natural state of circulation in the body! The entire philosophy of circular generation of _ki_ could be wrong!"

"But that… that can't be!" She suddenly felt dizzy and had to steady herself with her hand. "The circular generation of _ki_ has been with us for three thousand years! It can't be wrong!"

'Destroy the papers!' The thought came with all the force and speed of a freight train. 'Destroy the papers! No one has to know!'

Cologne closed her eyes.

No: that was foolish. Not only because Ryouga knew it, and not because the boy probably had copies of everything he wrote, but because what was the point? Even if, **even if**, all that she had learned had been… incomplete or incomprehensive, what good would trying to uphold it by force be? It was that same thought that you don't have to be wrong; that you don't have to admit that you made a mistake, which had driven Shigenosuke and his theories into exile in the first place.

Change.

Change was hard to accept.

"I think the Mark will work," Ryouga spoke up, bringing her back to the here and now.

Slowly, hesitantly, Cologne nodded in agreement.

"The theory has some merits," she conceded. "And it already worked on you before. But can you use it on yourself? Or on others? It takes years to master normal calligraphy."

"I don't suppose you could learn it?" he asked, already knowing the answer.

"This art is very different from the sealing techniques known to our village," Cologne replied. "I would guess that you are already more proficient in it than I am. However, even if you can make the strokes with absolute accuracy, can you seal the ink in place properly? I can see without trying that your aura is still conflicted and your mind is in turmoil, no matter how much you try and hide it."

He frowned. "It isn't that bad."

"In your state of mind," the old woman answered, inclining her head towards the diagrams they had just looked over, "**_This_**…" referring to the technique with some disapproval in her tone, "Could have potentially devastating results, improperly applied. You could easily cripple yourself or others."

Ryouga was without a reply for a few seconds.

"Some," he finally said, "Would say that power always comes with risks attached."

"That is very true," Cologne agreed. "But don't forget why you want that power in the first place. You've learned a great deal, you've improved, simply by learning the nature of this technique. Don't throw all that away by actually using it. I'd place good money on Shigenosuke's tragedy being the same as Bra Shu's."

The lost boy's eyes tightened in thought.

"Learn from the mistakes of us old folks," she added with a wry smile. "It's why we're here, after all."

* * *

Genma found his son to be in a foul mood, even before Ryu arrived. They were using the Tendo Dojo for the night's special business, and the elder Saotome arrived with his wife only to find his heir and only son… pouting. Naturally, he'd responded by reproaching the boy for being so surly and unmanly in the presence of his esteemed mother and promptly gotten punted across the room.

The boy never did have respect for his elders.

"Ranma, son," Nodoka spoke up, stepping between the two martial artists to mediate before a one sided fight broke out. "What's wrong?"

Ranma, for all his age and new found maturity, huffed irritably.

"Nothin," he replied, though the sound of his voice and the frown on his face made it clear that it was anything but. Genma watched his son with disapproval; it wasn't like the boy to be touchy like this. He was usually carefree, even in the face of danger and difficulty. About the only things that really depressed him were losing in front of others and… ah! That had to be it, then. Girl trouble.

What a foolish thing to let get to him, though.

"Ranma," Nodoka said, motherly tone daring him to be evasive.

The pigtailed fighter glowered at his father. "Just cleaning up this stupid old panda's mess, as usual. That's all."

Nodoka plainly hadn't guessed what the trouble was, but she stood by her son, waiting for him to explain. Genma rather regretted bringing her. They were here on family business, and she was here as a wife of the Saotome Clan, solely to bear witness to the goings on of the family style. Ever since she had caught up with her son a few months ago, Nodoka had been trying hard to play catch-up for the years she'd been away from her boy. Except he wasn't her boy.

He was Genma's heir.

Ranma was a master of the Saotome School of the Strongest Martial Art on Earth. He did not need to be coddled or babied. Nodoka had to understand that: that the Art came first before all else! Unfortunately, her reunion with her son and her decision that he had indeed grown to be a 'man among men' paradoxically threatened to make their son soft. As usual, it would be up to the boy's father to keep him on course.

"It's Ucchan," he said, eventually yielding to his mother's concern and curiosity.

"Did you two have a fight?" Nodoka asked before Genma could speak up.

"No. It wasn't like that," Ranma answered, head bowed. "A while back she said that she wanted to put off the engagement… but today she said she wants to see other people. She wanted to make sure I was ok with it. I think she _dumped_ me! For real!"

"I'm so sorry, son," his mother gently placed a hand on his crossed arms. "But maybe this is for the best. Ukyou seemed like a nice girl, but the engagement was made under unusual circumstances. Besides, aren't you going to marry Akane?"

"I dunno," Ranma sounded unsure. "Maybe. Probably."

"The schools must be united," Genma interrupted, standing tall with his hands resting on his belt, thumbs curled under the heavy black fabric. "It is your responsibility to secure the foundation of a new generation of Anything Goes Martial Arts! Out of all of us, Ranma, only you have the potential to surpass The Master."

Ranma's brows knitted up in frustration.

"I ain't gonna marry someone just 'cause you say so!" The pigtailed boy pointed at his father. "Akane and I are gonna take it slow and see how things work out. Don't start thinking ya can pull another wedding out under us without warning!"

Genma glowered back, not budging an inch on the subject.

"Which reminds me," Ranma continued to grill his old man. His Japanese, much less formal than his English, betrayed his vexation. "Ucchan says her father wants the dowry back that ya stole. She said ya can expect an invoice soon and that ya better pay up if ya know what's good for ya!"

Genma had already spoken to Ukyou's father about the situation with the dowry he'd "misplaced" a decade ago. In fact, they had spoken at length. Kazuo still had one heck of a right hook, and the Saotome patriarch had sported a shiner for several days. With Ranma almost certain to marry Akane, Genma had been willing to compromise on the issue. The problem was that Kazou had an inflated sense of how much that little food carthad been worth.

He could buy a car with the money Kazuo expected him to pay!

"Hrumph!" was Genma's dismissive response to that matter.

"Great," Ranma snorted in open disgust. "Meaning I'll probably have to foot most of the bill."

"You never intended to settle down with that girl anyway," Genma reminded his ungrateful heir. "I don't see why breaking things off would make you bawl your eyes out. Act like the man you are!"

"I…!" Ranma bit back his initial response, sucking on his lower lip and looking away. "Yeah, maybe not. But that don't mean I have to be happy about it. Ucchan's one of my oldest friends. It's like… like she doesn't want me anymore."

"I'm sure that isn't it at all," Nodoka tried to be supportive.

"I know that ain't it! She even said she wanted to be best friends. I just," Ranma shook his head, cutting short what he had almost said. "It was like she was always there for me before."

"You just wanted attention and free food." Genma jumped back in. "That's fine. If I had pretty girls fawning over me like they used to…"

"Genma, dear…"

He coughed self-consciously at his wife's warning tone.

"What I meant to say, boy, is that you have a healthy appreciation for the attentions of the opposite sex. This is perfectly fine; however, you are a man now. That means one woman. The others need to know you've decided to honor the commitments of your family and your Art."

"There ya go again!" Ranma growled. "Treatin' it like I don't have a choice."

"You…!"

"You do, of course," Nodoka cut off her husband, calm brown eyes daring him to not let her handle their son.

"Now ya just sound like yer humoring me," the young man grumbled, arms still tightly crossed. "Look, I know I should probably be happy I don't gotta worry about Ukyou botherin' me anymore, but I'm still pissed off about it anyway. Whatever. At least I'm in a fighting mood now."

"Can you still use the Umisenken?" Genma asked, pointedly.

The younger man leaned casually against the wall of the Dojo. "It isn't gonna be a problem, pops."

"Ranma," Nodoka said. "You know we will support you, no matter what you do."

It was something that the disrespectful boy had his father to thank for, if Genma had anything to say about it. Nodoka hadn't so much as touched her katana since they moved into Seiran, so impressed was she with her son and all he had accomplished. In her own words, he was fighting 'for the good of mankind' and a perfect example of a 'true man.' It was a far cry from how she had been before, lugging that blade around to enforce their _seppuku_ promise on the off chance Ranma had grown up to be a fairy or crossdresser or whatever else she found lacking in manhood.

They had only gotten this far, father and son, through Genma's wisdom and foresight. He was the one who had worked hard to keep their Jyusenkyou curses under wraps! He was the one who had worked to keep Nodoka from her son until he was ready to prove how manly he was. If Ranma had had his way, he would have strode out to meet his mother at the first opportunity and promptly gotten splashed and turned into a girl. What the Hell would the boy have done then?

It was only because of Genma's caution that they could stand together now as a family, with Nodoka so proud and sure of her son that she could say things like, 'we will support you no matter what you do.' Not that Genma expected his son to demonstrate his gratitude and appreciation, but the least he could do was show some modicum of proper respect. Genma grumbled at the injustice of it (conveniently forgetting all the times he nearly exposed their curses when he needed it as leverage).

But all that was in the past anyway!

More to the point: it was about time the boy started to shed his fiancés and focus on the more pressing matters in life. Maybe when Ranma became a father himself he would understand all that his dear father had done for him. One could only hope.

Meanwhile, the young man's composure melted slightly at his mother's words.

"Thanks," he replied, but before he could say more, his head perked up and he turned to the door. Genma did the same, and a second later, the Dojo entrance opened wide. Another young man stepped inside, wearing a black _gi_ and a white belt. With a fist cupped in his left hand, Kumon Ryu bowed respectfully.

"Let's get this started," Ranma said, pushing off the wall with his shoulders.

Only a few minutes later Ryu and Ranma sat across from each other in the Dojo's heavy combat chamber. The latter had exchanged his clothes for a white _gi_ and red belt. For the moment Nodoka joined Genma in the chamber itself, seated at the sidelines, but it had been agreed beforehand that she would leave when the fighting started. Genma would remain, putting no barrier between himself and what was to come.

"Kumon Ryu," Genma spoke with authority, sitting up straight and comporting himself with uncharacteristic dignity. "You have passed the two tests set before you, proving your knowledge of the Yamasenken and your understanding of the principles underlying the Art. You have demonstrated the ability to adapt and improve on the techniques you have been given. I, Saotome Genma, recognize you."

Ranma idly picked his ear with his pinkie. "Yeah, yeah."

Ryu bowed deeply. "Thank you, Saotome-sensei. You, too, Ranma."

The pigtailed boy smirked.

"One test remains. Only then shall we decide whether to allow you to form a branch of the Art practicing the forbidden style of the Yamasenken." Genma, at least, took his role seriously. "By your honor, you have agreed to abide by our decision."

"I have," Ryu replied without hesitation.

Genma nodded twice as a courtesy.

"As you know, the Umisenken was designed to counter and defeat the Yamsenken. To prove that your Yamasenken is worthy of being taught, it must surpass the original. It must defeat the Umisenken."

Ryu stoically waited, body coiled like a spring ready to snap.

"Nodoka." Genma turned to his wife. "For your own safety, I'd ask that you please leave the room and watch from outside."

"Yes, husband," the auburn haired woman bowed her head demurely. When she felt like it, she could very convincingly play the role of dutiful and submissive wife. Nodoka was of a very conservative upbringing; she knew when to let her husband have his way and went to put her foot down. Or, in some cases, when to use a heavy blunt object rather than a foot. Genma reflected on that fact that it was a minor miracle that he had managed to get Ranma out of the house and on that training trip without being bludgeoned to death by his blushing young bride.

Nodoka took a little time making her exit, drawing it out to show respect to both her son and his opponent. She had met Ryu before, Genma knew, and at the time she had even thought that the powerful young man had been her long lost son. She had a soft spot for the motherless boy due to the experience, and she had urged both Ranma and Genma to be open to the possibility of un-sealing the _Yamasenken_ for Ryu's sake.

But that was in his hands, not hers.

"The rules of the fight are the following," Genma spoke up once Nodoka was safely out of the room. "Ranma, you are only to use the proper Umisenken techniques you have been taught. Ryu, you may use any techniques related to or derived from the Yamasenken. As I created both styles, I will be watching to ensure this rule is not broken or bent. You will fight for thirty minutes or until one of you is knocked unconscious for more than ten seconds."

"Agreed," Ranma and Ryu replied as one, standing up and assuming combat forms. The Saotome heir was relaxed, his arms held almost limply at hi sides. Ryu's stance was hard and direct, fists clenched and legs set. Ranma craned his neck, working the kinks out with a few barely audible pops and cracks.

Genma raised his hand.

"We begin…" And then slashed it down. "Now!"

* * *

Tracking him down wasn't as hard as people always said.

"So, P-chan, huh?"

"Nabiki," his greeting was a little sour, but she'd expected that. She ignored him at first, whistling sharply and calling Shirokuro over to her side. Nabiki knew he wouldn't dare to go anywhere without his faithful companion. Luckily Shirokuro was a smart dog; she couldn't have been keen on letting her master outside in his state of mind in the first place. He may have been the proverbial lost boy, but he was a creature of very predictable habits. Where else would he have gone after that little talk with Nabiki's sister?

He wanted to get lost.

"Well, I'm not surprised you heard so quickly," he said, hanging his head. He appeared unhurt. Untouched even. Akane hadn't so much as laid a hand on him, or so Nabiki had heard. It looked to her, though, like he would have preferred to take a few shots to the chops rather than stew in the juices of his own guilt.

"Of course I heard," Nabiki said, taking a few steps towards him, Shirokuro alongside her. "Akane thought I knew."

"Huh," was his only response.

Nabiki frowned, but her mouth was still quirked in an amused smile.

"I simply must have known, right? And not told her because you slipped me a little something on the side?" She rolled her eyes. "But I'm impressed, Hibiki. You're more perverted than I thought!"

"I'm not perverted!" He stood up and all but yelled it. Slowly, he turned towards the two door guards and grinned weakly. Facing Nabiki again, he repeated his affirmation, "It was entirely innocent."

"Really?"

"Absolutely!" He paused, flinching a bit at the look she gave him. "Ok, it wasn't _intentionally_ perverted."

"I suppose that's probably true. A shy guy like you probably wouldn't know what to do with his hands anyway, even if he got them on a girl." She jabbed him a little sharply by adding. "Or hooves, as the case may be."

"I… I'm not even going to answer that!" he huffed, sitting back down. Nabiki seemed to want to say more, but not in front of prying ears. She waited a few seconds, lavishing attention on the Hibiki's unnaturally intelligent canine companion.

"Sir," one of the guards spoke up, holding out an ID card to the seated lieutenant of India Squad. "You're cleared to head outside."

"Thanks," Ryouga said, taking back his ID and tucking it back into its plastic sheath and then into his shirt pocket. The guards were part of some of the new security arrangements. Internal security had been tightened recently on Commander Yasuda's orders, and that included detailing some of the base MPs to new duties. Only the outermost door was fully automated now, the inner one requiring logged clearance and a second passcode that only the guards knew. Any attempt to leave without their code would probably trigger a silent alarm.

He glanced up at Nabiki, confirming that she was dressed for an outside excursion. He knew her well enough by this point just what that meant. She wanted to go outside with him where they could talk freely. Or, more likely, where she could grill him freely about the whole bloody P-chan thing.

"Come here, girl," he said, calling to Shirokuro and snapping his fingers. "Let's go for a little walk."

"I'll be coming along, too. I could use some fresh air." Nabiki handed her ID to the guard with a charming (others would call it disarming) smile.

"Ma'am." He took her card and quickly processed it. In fact, he was much more prompt about it than he had been with Ryouga's, a fact that the lost boy obviously noticed. He waited by the massive blast doors with a suspicious look.

"Here you go. Watch yourself out there, Miss Tendo. It's pretty icy."

"I will. Thank you!"

Exchanging pleasantries with the guard, she stood next to Ryouga and faced the door. He crossed his arms and waited. Soon enough, the blast shields started to unlock. They separated into two halves, massive metallic screws retracting from the space between them. Shirokuro watched it with calm familiarity before barking and jumping happy onto the waiting tram car.

Boarding it, Nabiki reached into her coat pockets and withdrew a pair of white and pink gloves. The guard hadn't been kidding when he had mentioned that it was icy (and rather cold) outside. To no one's surprise, Nabiki had come dressed and prepared. Ryouga felt no need to put on more than a simple jacket. It bore the worn out logo of a college he had visited a few years ago, and it had seen him through a great many long, cold nights.

"You were a little friendly with that guard," he said, feeling the need to just up and admit it. "You know him or something?"

"Nope," Nabiki replied with a casual shrug. "I'm just naturally endearing!"

Before he could say anything else, she cut him off.

"But, as I was saying before, I am a little impressed."

"What? By me being, in your words, 'perverted?'"

"Well, a little," she said with a breezy laugh. "Some of the girls at Furinkan did wonder about you."

"Hilarious."

"You did chase after a guy for years and constantly show up just to fight him."

"Oh, and that makes me gay. I guess I should have just screamed, 'marry me pigtailed girl' and set everyone straight."

"No. That would have just been weird," Nabiki said, correcting him. "I mean more, that it was impressive how you managed to keep your secret for so long. I can appreciate something like that."

Ryouga stared at her like she'd grown a second head. Or, given the fact that he'd seen weirder things in his life than a person with multiple heads, he stared at her like he had seen something _really_ outlandish and shocking.

"Are you serious?" he asked.

"Let me put it this way," she replied. "When I first found out, I laughed... for maybe a solid minute."

His response was wooden, "Well, I'm glad you found it so amusing."

"To put one over on not just Akane, but me, too? Me!" Nabiki crossed her arms in a mock imitation of being deep in thought. "All those times P-chan wandered in with stuff from you; all those times he ran out of the room and like five seconds later you barged in; all those times you looked nervous about cold water and how P-chan wouldn't take a bath with anyone but Ranma? And then there were all the hints he dropped!"

Ryouga's expression didn't betray any particular amusement at the situation.

"You only think it's funny because it happened to Akane," he dared to say. Boldness from already alienating one Tendo sister had obviously loosened his tongue. "If I'd done that to you, how would you feel?"

"Hmm," Nabiki pretended to think it over. "I'd probably be pretty angry."

He held out his hands, as if to imply she should have some kind of revelation.

"See? There you go!"

"Ryouga," she replied, closing her eyes. "I'm not my sister's keeper. At one point she had half the male students in the school attacking her every morning to try and get a date. I let her handle that problem and I'll let her handle this one, too. As far as I'm concerned, it really doesn't have much of anything to do with me."

At that, he seemed put aback. "R… really?"

"Of course, pretending to be someone's pet is pretty pathetic," as she spoke, her body language and expression becoming less playful and more serious. "Even as far as unrequited love goes. But even I could see that P-chan had been showing up less and less frequently this last year. I guess that had to do with Akari, didn't it?"

He stared at her with wide eyes.

"You're kind of scary," he admitted, but quickly recovered and composed himself. "But you're right. Akari was part of it, but… but it was degrading for me, too. The first couple times it was, Hell… I was a lonely guy. It felt good to be loved by someone without having to actually do anything to earn it, you know? Whenever things didn't turn out my way, I'd turn into P-chan for a day or two."

"But," he continued, staring up at the ceiling of the tram car. "But by the time I knew I had to stop, by the time I knew it wasn't helping, I couldn't. Akane would ask if I had seen P-chan, or she'd blow me off and…" he shook his head. "Doesn't excuse it, what I did was my fault, but it's the truth."

The tram car came to a stop at the mountain exit.

The two silently left, and Ryouga swiped his card at the smaller external blast door. It retracted with a hiss, and a wave of cold air blew into the small and unadorned concourse. Outside, the familiar faux weather outpost greeted them, along with a few light flurries. Up above, the sky was slightly overcast. It was likely to snow again tonight.

"Answer me honestly, Hibiki," Nabiki then asked, "Do you regret it?"

He walked ahead a few paces, Shirokuro leading them on.

"It ruined my relationship with a friend," he finally said. "Two friends, actually. Do I regret it? Yeah. But… I also think it kept me going a few times when I would have otherwise just given in and died. The will to live… for a long time, I clung to life for pretty nasty reasons: Revenge. Hate. Spite. The thought of having someone waiting for me, even as a pet pig, was a beacon in an otherwise shitty existence."

Nabiki followed close behind him, her boots making soft crunching noises in the un-groomed and undisturbed snow.

"Did you tell Akane that?"

Ahead of her, he shook his head.

"Maybe you should when you get back," she said, taking a few long strides to catch up to him. "You know, instead of just sulking out here in the wilderness."

To her unspoken relief, he laughed a bit.

"Is that how it looks?" he asked rhetorically, running a hand through his hair.

"If Akane is like me, and she actually is in a few ways, then she's probably more angry that you kept the secret from her, rather than being disgusted with what you did. You didn't actually do anything bad as P-chan, did you?"

"No!" he protested his innocence. "Really! You know me!"

"I guess I do," she relented with a hidden smile. "So you're going to go back there and work this out?"

He grunted in what passed for acquiescence.

"Good to hear it," Nabiki said, pausing to crouch low and scoop up a handful of snow. Seeing her, Ryouga stopped and pivoted, curious as to what she was up to.

"What…?"

BAF!

"So why didn't you tell **me**, huh?" Nabiki growled. "After all that stuff I told you! All that time you had this secret and didn't tell me?"

The lost boy wiped the cold snow from his face. "Geez! I'm sorry!"

"You told Kasumi but not me! You didn't _trust_ me, did you?" she leveled the question at him like a heavy plasma rifle. She stood back up, watching him intently. Ryouga finished brushing the last bit of slush from his hair and at least had the presence of mind to look sheepish.

"It, it," he stammered. "It wasn't like that."

"Then what was it like?" she asked, finally letting some anger and disappointment into her tone. "Because from where I'm standing it looks like I bared my worst secret to you, like I trusted you completely, while you didn't feel the same!"

Ryouga swallowed his next sentence before it came out, preferring to stand in silence for a few pregnant seconds. He was clearly thinking, and very carefully too, before he spoke. One hand reached up to anxiously rub the back of his neck. A dusting of snow still clung to his hair and his tiger striped bandanna. Still glaring at him, Nabiki knew what she wanted to hear. It was only one thing.

Honesty.

"I…" he finally ventured to say. "I was ashamed."

And, for some irrational reason, Nabiki felt bad for him.

"You idiot," she spoke up, not wanting to see him debase himself by saying any more. Nabiki wasn't really sure when, but at some point over the last few months she'd actually started to like the easily depressed, easily enraged, mercurial and often times stupid young man standing in front of her. He wasn't the pretty, well cultured rich guy she had sometimes imagined she would fall for. Instead, he was a meathead fighter like her father had once been. It was probably pretty sad.

"Sorry?" he offered.

"Alright, Hibiki," she said, walking up to him. "Apology accepted. In the future, let's be honest with each other. I'll let you know my secrets, and you let me know yours. We'll make this a serious partnership."

He visibly brightened.

"Right!" he agreed, but added the caveat, "Though I don't think you'll like a lot of what I have to tell you."

"That's perfect!" she replied, reaching into her coat pocket. "Because I know you won't like pretty much all of my secrets!"

A nervous sweat drop trickled down his brow.

"Well, that's kind of ominous…" he slowly said.

With a wide, bright smile Nabiki retrieved something from her coat's inner pocket and held it out for him. Taking it, the lost boy could see that it was a picture: a picture of her. The little freeze frame was the same size as the ones he had bought from her before, and just the size to fit snugly into a wallet. It was a simple photo of her smiling prettily and hugging Shirokuro, but the slightly smug expression on her face almost seemed to imply that she had planned the whole thing out before hand.

He looked up at her and saw that exact same look but in the flesh.

"Two thousand yen," she said happily. "If you want it, that is."

Ryouga wasn't completely dumbstruck; just mostly.

"… You're going to be an expensive girlfriend, aren't you?"

"Very!"

He looked down at the picture for a few seconds.

"Well?" Nabiki prompted, sounding for the first time a bit nervous herself. "You aren't going to try and haggle, are you?" Still no response. "Sixteen hundred yen then. Cheapskate!"

"I'll pay you when we get back to the base," he decided, and took out his wallet. His old one had been destroyed at Phoenix Mountain, and that seemed almost like a lifetime ago now. This one still had a single picture in it; of a girl he missed and still cared for deeply. The sight of Akari instantly dampened his mood, and he found the idea of replacing her picture unbearable.

At the same time… he knew she wouldn't have wanted him to use her memory like he had been. Akari was a gentle girl who disliked violence. She would never have wanted him to embark on a crusade in her name or wanted her memories to feed a lust for vengeance. He knew this, he had since the beginning, but he had gone forward anyway, using that drive because he found it useful. Now, staring at her picture, he wondered if she would finally approve.

Sliding out her picture, he put Nabiki's in its place, tucking the painful photograph into one of the other plastic jackets. He would never forget Akari or how he had failed to protect her. He would never forgive those that had taken her life. She would always be there, no matter what else changed in his life. Closing his wallet, he let out a breath he just realized he had been holding. Tucking the wallet away, Ryouga was surprised when a hand reached out and grasped his own.

"Nabiki?" He looked down at her gloved hand, held freely in his.

"Life's too short and unpredictable, Hibiki." She gave his hand a squeeze. "Let's make it interesting while it lasts."

Mindful of his strength, he carefully squeezed back.

Together, they walked through the snow, following Shirokuro away from the base along a familiar forest path. There would be time later to deal with all the troubles waiting back in Seiran; out here, alone, they only had each other and the bond they has unexpectedly grown to share.

"You know, Ranma has a picture of his girl self in his wallet."

"Hahaha! Why am I not surprised?"


	96. New Beginnings III

* * *

**From**: Tendo Nabiki  
**Sent**: Wednesday, December 22, 2006, 20:42  
**To**: Sqd. 2ndclass. Kuonji Ukyou  
**Subject**: An opportunity

I was just thinking back to the old days in Nerima and remembering how close you and a certain directionless member of India Squad used to appear to be. Those were the days, weren't they? I'm sure everything is nice and platonic between you and your drinking buddies, but just because you aren't going to buy a pair of shoes doesn't mean you can't look at them, now does it? If you find yourself with an itch, no matter what or who it may be, I'm sure I can help you scratch it so to speak.

You know how to find me and you know my usual rates.

---

"Supreme excellence is found in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."  
Sun Tzu

---

Nabiki Tendo  
General Intelligence and Communication  
Far East Asia Branch  
United Nations Extraterrestrial Combat Organization  
Ext. 6022 - phone  
Ext. 8434 – fax

* * *

**From**: Sqd. 2ndclass. Kuonji Ukyou  
**Sent**: Wednesday, December 22, 2006, 21:03  
**To**: Tendo Nabiki  
**Subject**: Re: An opportunity

You're terrible.

You know how to find me, and you know my usual rates.

I'll think about it.

- Ukyou

* * *

Genma narrowed his eyes at the oncoming vacuum blade, tilting his head to the side as it thundered past to impact harmlessly into the exotic alloy wall behind him. The fight was more than half way into its imposed time limit and so far the two boys had done little more than test each other's defenses. They'd exchanged a few very basic opening moves of the _Yama_ and _Umisenken_, and then fallen into a predictable back and forth of conventional blows. Normally, such a routine would have quickly fallen into Ranma's court, but with both of them fighting under a technique restriction the result was a stalemate.

Ranma was faster than Ryu and just about as strong, but the Kumon heir took the blows easily and came back for more. It was essentially irrelevant to the fight itself, but it did show that Ryu could fight effectively in hand to hand even without using _Yamasenken_ techniques. Genma watched as the boy made another flat palmed strike, arms slashing like swords as Ranma ducked and dodged with superhuman speed. Ryu could cut a steel bar in half with the edge of his hand or easily tear out a man's heart through his rib cage. No one had ever implied that he couldn't _fight_.

The question was: had his _Yamasenken_ surpassed the original?

Ryu and Ranma broke off their exchange, jumping away from each other in tandem. Neither looked particularly exerted. In fact, they looked very lively, energized even. Ranma slowly lifted his arms back into the limp, unusual stance of the _Umisenken_ while Ryu rolled his arms around, warming up his muscles. By unspoken agreement, the two fighters started to become a bit more serious.

Genma recognized it a half second before it happened.

"Akane!?" Ryu's startled yell actually succeeded in distracting his opponent.

'Sloppy,' Genma thought, watching as his distracted son barely managed to block a snap kick to the side of the neck. Ranma should have known better. The _Yamasenken_ relied on verbal distractions to stun an opponent. Usually it was just a simple 'don't move!' but anything that drew an opponent's attention and broke his focus would work. The auditory assault would then act to momentarily paralyze the target leaving him open for a deadly blow.

Ranma used the force of Ryu's kick to gain distance. He then brought out a large bath towel and seemingly disappeared in midair. Genma watched carefully. The invisibility of the _Umisenken_ was counterpart to the _Yamasenken's_ verbal attacks. It allowed the way of the silent thief to dictate the terms of a fight, to attack from an unexpected angle, or to simply make an easy escape. The stance of the _Umisenken_ itself and the mentality of its user made it naturally impossible to read or anticipate its attacks, but the _Goshin Dai Ryuusei Fu_ (Self-Protection Big Falling Star Cloth) also hid the user from sight itself.

'What will you do now, Ryu?' he thought. 'You can't see him. You can't sense his intent. He won't listen to your taunts. What will you do?'

Standing by himself, Ryu straightened his stance, took a deep breath, and lowered his arms. Genma was initially surprised by the response, but quickly came to see the strategy. Ryu had to know that the point of the _Umisenken's_ stealth was to attack from an undefended point. He was attempting to counter this not by preventing that attack, but instead concentrating totally on a counterattack.

'Interesting,' Genma thought with some hint of respect. 'That stance. The concentration. He's putting all his energy and focus into a counterattack. By abandoning even the thought of defense, he's counting on his durability and reflexes to respond instantly to any attack. The Umisenken itself relies on redirecting the enemy's strength. It is weak when it comes to direct attacks!'

Ranma's stealth vanished as he attacked, materializing out of thin air right behind Ryu. His hands blurred as he began the _Hakuda Toshin Shou_, the White Snake Spitting True Palm. Genma nodded in agreement. Despite the fact that Ryu knew this move, it was still the most appropriate attack the _Umisenken_ had. Since any attack can render the user visible, the idea is to strike from within the closest possible distance.

The pigtailed martial artist only got in the first five strikes, though, before Ryu's body reacted. His stance lowered as his legs parted, preventing the use of the _Shichuu Rakuchi Sei_ (Brace Falling Down Strength), and his right arm swung back. Ryu's whole body then turned via only the muscles in his calves and feet. His right arm burst upwards, interrupting Ranma's _Hakuda Toshin Shou_.

'Not bad.'

Ryu then responded with a _Geimon Tetsu Sen Shi_ (Welcome Gates Fan Finger): a flat palmed strike aimed for Ranma's midsection. Genma remembered when he had first developed that move and had practiced by removing the ribs from a frozen side of beef at a slaughterhouse. One strike, one rib. Against the human body, it was devastating. Predictably, Ranma used the appropriate _Umisenken_ counter: the _Gaito Retsuga Dan_ (Armored Door Splitting Fang Failure).

Except, at that moment, Ryu curled his hand into a fist.

'What is he doing?' Genma saw Ranma pull back at the last second; having realized that biting Ryu's hand to immobilize it wouldn't work as it was. 'The Yamasenken relies on the power of cutting blows and the special conditioning of the hands. It is similar to Shitojutsu, except even more specialized. What is he doing forming a fist like that?'

Ranma flipped his protection cloth around his body, rolling it into a whip and blocking Ryu's Kinshi Kinbakusho (Gold Cord Tight Binding Soar). While they dueled, Ranma aligned his feet to land just as Ryu's right hand lashed out with a _Kijin Raishu Dan_ (Demon God Assault Bomb) vacuum blade. However, his aim was not at Ranma himself, but rather his feet. Ryu jumped up and ran towards his opponent, repeating the move.

Genma tapped his finger against his bicep, his arms still tightly crossed.

'He's keeping Ranma off balance to prevent him from disappearing again. Such precise strikes! To think that anyone could use the Kijin Raishu Dan with such accuracy…!"

"Kijin Raishu Tekidan!"  
(Demon God Assault Grenade)

Ryu continued his assault, striking at Ranma's feet to make it harder to block the blades with his protective cloth. For a few seconds, it looked like Ryu had the other boy on the defensive. Ranma was backing up towards a wall… but then Ranma picked up speed, running back and up to the wall. Genma's eyes widened just a fraction as he saw Ranma run along the wall itself, intercepting three of Ryu's desperate vacuum blades.

'Good move, boy. Use your surroundings! By running along the wall, with your opponent now above you, you make it impossible for him to attack below your center of gravity. In other words, you changed the perspective between yourself and your enemy to your advantage!'

"Damn!" Ryu cursed as Ranma disappeared again. The Kumon heir turned around, eyes darting back the forth. Taking another resigned breath, he lowered his arms, ready to focus on counterattacking the inevitable attack.

'Ranma,' Genma thought also waiting for the strike, 'Won't make the same mistake twice. The greatest strength of the Yamasenken is in the arms and hands. The next attack will be below the belt.'

Sure enough, a moment later Ranma appeared, aiming to disorient Ryu by sweeping his legs. This was the _Shichuu Rakuchi Sei_ (Brace Falling Down Strength) that the Kumon fighter had wanted to avoid before. With his stance broken or disrupted, the _Yamasenken_ itself would have its effectiveness cut by two thirds. Or that was what should have happened.

Instead, Ryu went with the fall, leaned forward, and landed on his hands. Fingers trailing along the _tatami_ mats that covered the floor, he attacked from that position with his legs. Ranma barely had time to scoot away before the first leg-fired Kijin Raishu Dan descended with the speed of a bullet. Ryu spun like a top, legs snapping loud enough to hear, his strikes precise – though less so than when he used his hands and arms.

'As expected, his skill with the Kijin Raishu Dan exceeds my own," Genma thought with amazement.

Ranma jumped straight up, correctly gauging that the one angle that Ryu couldn't attack him from was directly above. It made sense: from where he was, the _Yamasenken_ master didn't have enough range of movement with his legs alone to 'shoot' a vacuum blade straight up. Ryu started to reverse his stance, but Ranma rushed down, pushing physically off the ceiling and bringing out his protective cloth, ready to use it to choke and bind.

"Haizan Tokai Tai! Inverted!"  
(High Mountain Fall-to-Sea Posture Inverted)

"Kijin Raishu Sateraito!"  
(Demon God Assault Satellite)

The two exploded in motion and went flying. Even Genma's trained eyes hadn't followed all of what had happened just then. He could see that Ranma had been diving, intent on using the High Mountain Fall-to-Sea Posture to clamp Ryu's legs shut and then blind and choke him with the Falling Star Cloth. For a moment, it had looked like Ryu would actually use the _Kijin Dai Ran Bu_ (Demon God Big Mad Dance) – a wild attack that sent vacuum blades in random directions.

'No. This was different.'

Ranma barely landed on his feet, arms over his face in a warding gesture. They had cuts and welts on them in a series of straight lines. Lowering his arms a bit, he stared at Ryu, who was just now getting to his feet. The Kumon heir had a number of small, thin vacuum blades… spinning around him.

"Kijin Raishu Sateraito," Ryu said again, breathing heavily. "No one knows better than I do that the Yamasenken is weak on defense. That's why I tried to toughen my body to compensate, but I knew it wouldn't be enough. This is the first purely defensive technique of the new Yamasenken."

"Boy!" Genma spoke up, and both youths turned to face him. "That move has nothing to do with the principle of the Yamasenken."

"You mean it has nothing to do with breaking into a house to rob it?" Ryu asked facetiously, finishing the sentence with a dismissive snort. "You're right. It doesn't. But during our last fight, you two said something to me. You said that the Yamasenken and Umisenken were arts 'to live' and that they were of no use to me as they were."

He smirked. "Of course, at first I thought you were just blowing smoke in my face. Martial arts based in thievery? But then I began to wonder if that was really any worse than an art based on destruction. Was the Yamasenken impossible to divorce from the intentions it had been based on? What does it mean to have an art that wants you 'to live?'"

"It is true that the Yamasenken likens one's opponent to a house and that you then break into it," Ryu continued. "However, that means that the reverse is also true!" He held up his hands. "On defense, my hands are my gates. My arms are my walls. My legs are my foundation. Each one of these has its own defenses. This is why my Yamasenken is different!"

He pointed directly at Genma.

"Get it now?" Ryu asked, but didn't wait for an answer. "I haven't been attacking Ranma! I've been defending my home from the Umisenken!"

As he finished, the now-faint vacuum blades orbiting his body lost cohesion and dispersed. Off to the side, Ranma sighed and scratched a spot hidden by his hair, tucking the Falling Star Cloth into his belt with his other hand. Genma stood stony silent for a couple seconds before nodding stoically.

"I think I've seen enough," he said, heading for the door. "Come on, boy. Let's talk this over. Ryu, you stay here."

"Yeah, yeah," Ranma grumbled but complied.

Ryu merely sat down, cross legged, his hands in his lap.

--

"The boy has made great progress," Genma conceded. "But I'm still not inclined to permanently unseal the Yamasenken. In any form."

"Genma, dear…"

"Now, wife, I know you have some affection for the boy, but he is not a Saotome. Even if he were, I would not let him use those techniques."

"Except you didn't so much as mumble when I started usin' the Umisenken again," Ranma interrupted.

"These are special circumstances," Genma responded, looking over to his son. Ranma was seated, like they all were, but with his back to one of the walls. He had been mostly silent since the fight had ended. Genma had assumed it was because he hadn't definitively won.

"Hey, pops, you remember the Family Treasure?" Ranma unexpectedly asked.

"Ah, yes," Genma replied, remembering. "What of it?"

His sharp eyed son gave him a knowing look. "I bet that box was empty, wasn't it?"

"Sadly yes," the elder Saotome remembered his shock and disappointment when, in trying to sell the so called treasure, he had found the lacquer box to be empty with a pawn ticket inside. "I suspect your grandfather pawned it without me knowing! He always was a crafty bastard!"

"Dear, that was not one of your more dignified moments," Nodoka chastised him, but not too sharply. She seemed used to it. "All that fuss over a little trinket. Wouldn't you have been happier not opening the case in the first place?"

"Eh? Well…"

"The point is," Ranma said, redirecting the conversation. "That maybe the biggest problem with the Yamasenken isn't the art itself but the old fart who developed it."

"Show some respect boy!" Genma barked, trying to regain his dignity. "You're the last person who should complain about my ways. Who made you a man among men? Who made you as strong as you are?"

"You," Ranma hastily added, "And a bunch of others, too. But you and Mister Tendo learned a lot from Happosai, right? You didn't respect him, did ya?"

"Different circumstances," Genma protested.

Ranma glanced over to the inner Dojo door, where Ryu was waiting for their decision. The pigtailed martial artist held out his hand and looked down at the parallel marks he'd gotten from the other fighter's vacuum blades.

"He's different from before," Ranma said, closing his hand into a fist. "He's learned a lot since I beat him and sealed up the Yamasenken. Fightin' him this time was totally different from before. **He** was different."

"What are you saying, boy?"

"I saw it with my own fists." The younger Saotome's eyes fell on his father. "You saw it too. You just don't want to create a new, rival school for when I inherit the dojo."

Genma gritted his teeth.

"Not gonna deny it?" Ranma's smirk faded. "I don't have a problem with rivals. Not at all. I say we let him have the Yamasenken."

"Ranma!" Nodoka said, voice and smile bursting with pride.

His father growled, unconvinced. "You're both being sentimental. I won't change my mind. The Yamasenken must remain sealed… for the good of the world. Who's to say that boy won't teach those evil arts to someone who will use them… less altruistically?"

"You could say that about anyone here," Ranma replied, and gradually got to his feet. "My decision's been made."

"No it hasn't!"

"Who's inheriting that Tendo Dojo again?" Ranma asked, pretending to think and tapping his chin with his finger. "Is it you, old man? Oh wait: it's me. And who's the only one with a steady job that's supporting the family right now? Oh, right, that's also me."

"I'm your father!" Genma snarled, also standing up.

"Genma," Nodoka warned, reaching for him to calm him down. Ranma seemed to have had enough, though. He ignored his father and headed for the door.

"You are my father, pops," he said while walking. "And you know what, I'll look out for ya so you and Mister Tendo can retire and play shogi and drink and talk about the old days. I'm fine with that. But in return, ya gotta let me do what I gotta do. You said it yourself: I'm the future of Anything Goes Martial Arts. Or is that a problem for ya?"

For once, Genma was at a loss for words.

"Is it?" Ranma asked again.

"If you don't wish to listen to your father's advice, then that's your loss," he finally said. "I suspect you'll come to regret the decision you made here."

"I might," the younger man admitted. "But at least I'll be regretting my decision and not yours."

Ranma opened the inner Dojo door and walked inside. A second later, the door closed behind him.

"Cheeky boy," Genma grumbled, glaring daggers at the door in lieu of his missing son. But, gradually, his frown transformed into a smirk.

"Like father like son," Nodoka said, standing close to him. She then poked him in the stomach. "At least in some ways."

Genma laughed at that.

--

"The Yamasenken is yours now," Ranma said, not mincing words. "Don't mess it up."

Still seated, Ryu bowed his head respectfully.

Ranma turned to leave, but stopped with his hand on the door.

"I've been thinking," he added, speaking over his shoulder. "Maybe, someday, I'll have a new Umisenken to show you, too."

And then, having said what he wanted to, he left.

He didn't hear Ryu's whoop of triumph fill the room.

* * *

**From**: Sqd. 2ndclass. Shan Pu  
**Sent**: Wednesday, December 22, 2006, 21:32  
**To**: Lt. Saotome Ranma; Lt. Hibiki Ryouga; Sqd. 2ndclass. Mu Tzu; ActSrg. Kumon Ryu; Sqd. 2ndclass. Kuno Tatewaki; Sqd. 2ndclass. Kuonji Ukyou  
**Cc:** Medical Science Oversight Committee  
**Subject**: Konatsu  
**Attached**: Konatsu_Procedure_12.22.06

As you know, I've been working on helping Konatsu.

I have identified the basic problem with some help from my great grandmother. Put simply, he has several blocked chakras. Most of you have some experience with pressure points and know that even a blocked point usually resets itself naturally over time. Konatsu's chakras aren't resetting, and I think the problem is a sort of self-reinforcing psionic block. His body doesn't recognize that it has a problem so it isn't correcting it.

To fix this problem, I will need several volunteers to help me. We will need to re-activate sixteen pressure points and four chakras by hand. The process should take anywhere between three and four hours. I should also tell you that there is some risk involved in the procedure, both to Konatsu and to those helping me. Each volunteer will need to help me synchronize with a chakra point and there may be some backlash if things go wrong.

I've attached a file with some information on what I plan to do.

Please read it and get back to me if you want to participate.

Shan Pu  
Squaddie 2nd Class  
Juliet Squad

-----

Shampoo returned to her room, a hot cup of coffee in hand. It would be a couple minutes before it had cooled enough to drink, but the caffeine injection would help keep her alert for another hour or so. It would be her last drink for the night; she intended to get a good night's sleep before tomorrow. She'd spent all day working on Konatsu's problem, aware of the fact that every day's delay only made the problem worse for the ninja boy.

It had gotten to the point where she went over the procedure in her head even when she ate and relaxed. It was always there but it wasn't a hindrance. It felt _good_. Cologne had set her on the path and then left her to develop a solution that would work. Despite being a bit unsure at first, she had quickly reignited the passion she'd had when she first started to work in pressure points, years ago.

It was different from when she had been handed down some forbidden techniques by Sink. What she was doing now was new and totally unprecedented in the history of the Amazon village (or what was left of it anyway). Some of the work was based on some research conducted over in America by some other UNETCO scientists and doctors, but much of it came from the Amazon archives regarding pressure points and chakras. Through X-Com, she literally had access to the knowledge of the entire world on demand.

She'd even gotten some interested emails from researchers in other bases.

Back in her room, Shampoo sighed softly and put the still-too-hot cup of roasted coffee down next to a full body diagram she had printed out earlier. Sitting down in front of her personal computer, she took a moment to tear open a pair of sugar packets. Emptying the artificial sweetener into the cup and stirring it with a tiny plastic spoon she used her left hand to pop open her internal email client. Maybe she'd gotten a few bites regarding that email she'd sent out before.

Sure enough, a number of new responses came up.

"Ryu…" she read the name, and clicked it.

The violent boy was new to their little martial arts clique, but he seemed strong; she smiled a bit to see that he had volunteered. The next email was from the local annoying okonomiyaki chef. Ukyou was also in. So was Ranma, which came as no surprise. The next email was from Mousse, who also wanted to come. By the time she finished reading them, she had even more responses. Kuno wanted to help if he could. So did the lost boy.

Everyone wanted in. Why wasn't she surprised?

--

**From**: Sqd. 2ndclass. Shan Pu  
**Sent**: Wednesday, December 22, 2006, 21:51  
**To**: Lt. Saotome Ranma; Lt. Hibiki Ryouga; Sqd. 2ndclass. Mu Tzu; ActSrg. Kumon Ryu; Sqd. 2ndclass. Kuno Tatewaki; Sqd. 2ndclass. Kuonji Ukyou  
**Subject**: Re: Konatsu

Since everyone wants to help I guess you can all come.

We'll practice for the first time tomorrow at 13:00 hours. I've reserved Wing Three of the Medical center. If things go well, we can try the procedure for real on Friday. I know we all want Konatsu up and active as soon as possible.

Shan Pu  
Squaddie 2nd Class

* * *

Akane opened her door knowing full well who was waiting on the other side.

"I didn't expect to see you back here," she said, tone icier and colder than the snowstorm outside.

"Yeah, well…" Ryouga mumbled, but coughed and straightened up a bit. "Well, I wanted to talk a bit."

She didn't seem pleased by the prospect.

"Haven't you said enough already today?" she asked.

Fighting back the urge to just vanish back into the comfort of the hallway, he took a deep breath. He stopped playing with his hands and instead forced them to his sides. With some difficulty, Ryouga looked her straight in the eyes.

"Please just hear me out," he struggled to say. "I… I don't want things to end like they did before."

For a while, it looked like she was going to slam the door on his face.

Again.

It would be an understatement to say that she was still mad at him. Just a few hours ago, right after she got off active duty, he had walked up to her door and confessed everything: that he had been her pet P-chan, that he had a Jyusenkyou curse, and that he was sorry for deceiving her. The words had hardly left his mouth before she realized just how much of a fool he had made her into. And for how long. Years. Years! How stupid she had to look to everyone not to have put two and two together! So she'd asked him to leave and he had done so without complaint.

"Please," he asked again. "Please, Akane-san."

But, for all that, he had been more than just some stranger pretending to be her pet. He had been a friend who helped her out (in both forms, she now realized) whenever she had been in need. He had even put aside his enmity with Ranma when she asked him to. He had risked his life for her and been the first male friend she had trusted in a long time. It was just that reason why finding out about this had hurt so much. She had trusted him…

"Ok," she said, finally relenting and stepping aside. "Come on in."

He stepped inside, and Akane found herself hoping she could truly forgive her friend. It hurt that he'd lied to her all this time, that even Kasumi had somehow known, but she'd hear him out. Maybe, just maybe, they could be friends for real this time. Akane wanted that and she was sure he did, too.

* * *

UNETCO Facility B9

Codename "Wyndham"

23:20 hours

Jan Regulski didn't particularly mind late night monitor shifts at the communication partition of the base's command facility. It was usually pretty quiet, and he could take some time to catch up on his reading. He'd recently gotten word from back home that his younger brother had finally proposed to the girl he'd been dating on and off for two years. It was good news, and Jan fully intended to try and rearrange his off-base relief rotation to coincide with the wedding day. Pity the flight to Europe from Australia, was so damn long.

At least for conventional planes anyway.

Looking up at the vast expanse of screens and monitors that lined the walls, Jan briefly wondered when he'd become so de-sensitized to it all. Here he was, in the heart of a room, with the sum totality of Australia and New Zealand's entire military and civilian radar infrastructure at his fingertips (that wasn't even counting the Indonesian, Malayan, and other allied systems). There was all that hanging above him, and he wasn't even that awed by it anymore. Impressed, yes, but awed? No. It had all become rather routine.

The sky over the southwestern hemisphere was a pretty crowded place, no matter the hour, with hundreds of planes making local and international flights, both military and civilian. From the Wyndham Facility, UNETCO could monitor it all. Automated systems searched through the routine (thankfully, that was all handled to local radar operators), filtering it for the unexpected and the anomalous.

For the most part, things in Wyndham were pretty laid back. Aside from a stint of activity three years ago centered on Antarctica (which had seen the base expand dramatically) the aliens didn't run many major ops in this part of the world any more. The exception had been A-18, a small alien base on the far side of the South Pole used mostly for UFO resupply, but now even that was gone. X-Com had raided it a week ago and finally cleared out that last little infestation (netting a large store of Elerium in the process).

Even before A-18 had been taken out, though; the most they saw in the region were minor incursions here and there broken by the occasional Abductor or Harvester. Compared to all the activity in Europe in '01, and then Africa in '04, and recently Asia in '06, Wyndham was a pretty damn cushy assignment. They still maintained a large compliment of troops on base, but they didn't even have a single active duty Avenger since B9 had a pretty low priority compared to the other heavy combat facilities.

It wasn't seen as any sort of liability. Interception duties here had been light over the last two years, plus they naturally only had a small amount of land to really cover. If worse came to worse, they could just call for help from their brothers up north or in the Americas. Those two areas were among the most heavily patrolled and defended, and along with Europe's Andermatt, they had the heaviest and most experienced combat squads. Not that Jan was particularly worried. Command was certain that the aliens didn't even know Wyndham existed in the first place, tucked safe and sound near the northern coast in a little visited wildlife preserve.

Leaning back in his chair, Jan saw one of his late night shift comrades stretch out his arms with a groan. He was about to lean over and check see if Menzies had any news or if he had heard anything interesting lately when his personal screen beeped. The computer had found an anomaly and was patiently requesting that he investigate and confirm it. Ninety percent of the time the so called "anomaly" was literally nothing at all, or at least nothing noteworthy, but Jan turned back to the monitor and quickly checked it anyway.

One could never be too sure.

"Huh. What's this?" He double checked the information on the altitude of the contact, routing the powerful radar systems built near Wyndham (explicitly for base use). Sure enough, it confirmed the altitude of the contact, as well as its speed. There was no doubt: 46 kilometers above sea level; almost 10,000 kilometers per hour…

It was a UFO.

"I've got something here," he called out, and forwarded the report up the chain to the boys in Hyperwave Transmissions. The room started to buzz as other technicians and operators also turned their attentions towards the sky.

"Hyperwave alignment complete," a voice announced on the intercom. A second later, Colonel Alphonse Brune emerged from his office. He was a rough old Frenchman and always eager to deal a blow to the enemy. Middle aged, but still as fit as a fighting man half his age, Brune stroked his short beard as he took in the situation, sharp blue eyes moving from one towering display to the next.

On the other side of the base, the Hyperwave Engineers finished calibrating the Decoder. It was basically a gigantic, high powered mind probe with a range of over two thousand nautical miles. When an anomaly was detected (unlike in the old days), they could use the Hyperwave Decoder to scan the area and confirm the existence of a UFO. The alien ships utilized a sort of radar jamming or cloaking by virtue of their gravity engines, but the Decoder was unaffected by any of that. It scanned an area psionically, instantly revealing any alien craft.

"Contacts!" Someone announced. "UFO confirmed! Three… four…"

'Multiple craft?' Jan wondered, checking his screen.

"Nine contacts! Delta formation."

"Decoding underway!" the Hyperwave team reported, transmitting their findings back to Command. Jan glanced up at the main display, now entirely taken up by a close up of the nine UFOs. They were just formless blips right now. Probably medium scouts. This wouldn't be the first time the aliens used a formation of them to buzz a city or cause some other mischief.

The Decoder continued its work, sampling and sorting the aliens onboard those craft, the general number of them, their species, and eventually their mission and its location. It was not an exaggeration to say that the invention, development, and widespread use of Hyperwave Decoders had saved innumerable lives over the last four and a half years of fighting. Some could even go so far as to attribute UNETCO's present existence to their use. All the Avengers and Firestorms in the world were useless without the ability to properly track and identify the enemy.

After a few seconds, the Decoder calculated the make up of the enemy craft.

Jan's mouth opened, but no words came out.

Even old Colonel Brune seemed stunned into silence.

"Jesus…" someone muttered. Jan almost felt like crossing himself, too, just to be safe. There in the screen above them, the results of the Decoder's initial analysis hung in bold letters for all to see. This wasn't a formation of medium scouts coming to buzz Brisbane or Darwin.

Six Battleships and Three Terror Craft.

"Gentlemen," Colonel Brune spoke up, raising his voice for all to hear. "Bring us to combat readiness. Activate all ground forces and put us on Code Four general alert. Inform Command that we have a situation."

The room burst into activity.

"Two of the craft are changing course! The others are heading north… northwest. They're heading over the Indian Ocean. Ten thousand kilometers per second."

"Seven of them have hit a cruising altitude of forty kilometers. The other two are descending."

"Are they headed for India? Or Al Rustaq?"

"Duiwelskloof just picked up… four large scouts… and six Abductors! They're headed northeast over Madagascar!"

"Sir, should we scramble Iota 1, 2 and 3?"

"No. Not yet." To his credit, Colonel Burne didn't sound as worried as he had to be. "Not until we know where those bastards are headed."

"Decoding complete!"

Jan checked the results and felt his whole body deflate. As if all those battleships and terror craft weren't bad enough, their occupants had also just been calculated by the boys in Decoding. One of the terror craft and two of the battleships were identified as majority Ethereal. The other two terror craft were piloted by Snakemen, and the remaining battleships were crewed by Mutons. The Decoder also identified their mission profile with cool, detached recognition.

The letters flashed on the screen, multiplied by nine.

**Objectives: Alien Terror**

-----

-----

_Author's notes:_

I don't usually make notes before or after a chapter, but I felt I should here. I suppose mostly because I think of this as a pretty big benchmark chapter. By the time this is online, it will bring "The Road to Cydonia" to about the 500,000 word mark. Half a million. Not bad! The whole adventure has turned out to run much longer than I originally thought. And I still have to finish it!

But it isn't just a benchmark in terms of length. I'm finally tying up the last few loose ends, including the stamp of approval on the is-it/isn't-it Ryouga/Nabiki pairing. I hope that that scene in particular shows just how far the two characters, especially Ryouga himself, have come over the course of those 500,000 words and 32 Chapters of TRTC.

I've tried to take the Ryo/Nabs thing slow and handle it in a believable way with the two gradually becoming fonder of the other, and seeing some of themselves in someone they had previously had only a passing or professional interest in. I treated both characters like they needed someone to really confide in; someone to accept their quirks. I'll admit that I had to soften up Nabiki a good deal over the course of the fic to make that work, but I think she still maintains a lot of what many like in the character: her intelligence, insight, wit and, of course, her manipulative tendencies and avaricious greed. Ha. But I've tried not to make her into a Suffering Saint Nabiki like a lot of fics tend to do.

Ryouga, as really the central character of the fanfic, has undergone the most development up to this point. Even before that, I used the post-manga Ryouga who was already developing a relationship with Akari, and I'll admit that this made things a bit easier for me. Takahashi actually develops the lost boy more than his rival in many respects, and he is the only person who actually seems to move on from the Nerima entanglements by the end of the story.

The story of TRTC is in many ways the story of how the NWC members come together in a time of extreme crisis and form bonds of camaraderie that "save them" in some way, or that at least allow them room to grow. Ukyou rediscovers her commitment to her Art and what it means (a theme already touched on in the manga); Ryu reforms the Yamasenken; Shampoo and Mousse have to correct the mistakes of their Elders, and carry on their heritage where Cologne and the others failed, learning in the process that they are a part of a broader society of like minded individuals – their friends; Akane proves herself by making it into an XCOM squad without being a tag-along or a burden, and she does it through hard work and against Ranma's own attempts to keep her out of danger; Konatsu finds a place where he feels he both belongs and where he can put his skills to use in a way that brings him dignity; Nabiki likewise realizes that she had to grow up some and clean up her act if she wants to make something of herself, and she works hard to prove that she's worth that karmic second chance. Ranma takes control of his life, bit by bit, and even against his own inclinations. Even Kuno… well, Kuno doesn't learn much, but he has a grand adventure that any samurai would be envious of!

Ryouga… he goes from practically suicidal and almost psychotically obsessed with revenge to finally learning to move on with his life and live – not for revenge – but because he genuinely wants to. All of the above, his friends and their trials and ambitions, are what really pull him back from becoming the monster he could easily have turned into. In the end, even the worst of all mind-fucks and the return of all his worst memories didn't change that he knew he had friends and a reason to keep living and fighting.

So we've come a long way, and we're heading into the home stretch!

I hope my readers have enjoyed TRTC, that they feel that the characters developed in interesting and realistic ways, and are looking for more. (cracks his knuckles) Well, guess I better get back to work, eh?

I also hope people aren't too disappointed that I didn't write the P-chan confession like many were expecting. Truth be told, as I approached this chapter, I came to think that the confession itself had been done virtually to death and from pretty much every angle. Sometimes it seems a fanfic is unusual if it doesn't have a P-chan confession of some sort. Instead, I decided to focus on how the confession and discovery affects the characters rather than the event itself… and ultimately, how pretty much everyone involved makes less of it than the Great Drama some assume it would be. Given how much has changed over the course of TRTC, I think this is doubly true.


	97. Auribus Teneo Lupum I

**Notes:**

Yes. Its been a long time since I updated TRTC. Graduation and getting my first taste of publishing research and lots of other real life distractions shifted my focus. I'm sorry about that, because I know what its like to read a fanfic that isn't complete and then see it hasn't updated in forever. To my thanks go out to my readership for bearing with me.

Also, as a point of interest:

One of my helpful readers, EternallyLostRyouga, is interested in commissioning a piece of TRTC related fanart based on suggested scenes or other input from the readership. It is part of a trio of commissions based on Claymades's, Lathis's, and my own Ranma 1/2 based fanfics. If you have an ideas for the art commission, please pass them onto myself (or to ELR) via PM or email. I'll also keep an eye on any reviews for their opinions on this as well.

Now, for the new chapter!

* * *

...

* * *

For six years, mankind has waged a Secret War against an enemy from Beyond the Stars. In late December of 2006, the two newly formed martial arts assault squads, India and Juliet, participated in the elimination of the last major alien base on Earth. With this bastion removed, the Sirius Conspiracy crushed, and the loss of the Joketsuzoku village avenged, only one great obstacle remains: the alien command center on Cydonia, Mars. Only then can Earth be safe. With that great battle looming ahead of them, India and Juliet also look inward to their individual hopes and dreams. This is their story.

* * *

The Avenger fighter-transport has a cruising speed of Mach Eight and it left little more than a burning blue-white streak in the dark night sky. The trackless expanse of the South Pacific raced by three thousand feet below the man made UFO; the dark wind swept waves bearing no witness to the passing of one of UNETCO's fastest and most powerful weapons of war. Outside, it was just one tiny speck against a star strewn sky.

Inside the ship, men and material were packed tight.

Two HWP hovertanks were opened up at the top and undergoing last minute maintenance checks. Their smooth sides were being covered with netting and dark brown and green camouflage. One of the tanks, already mostly disguised, also had a rig attached for infantry level heavy weapons and reserve ammunition supplies. The large plasma cannons mounted atop each HWP hummed softly as the impulse and projection mechanisms ran diagnostic tests to make sure they were operating at peak efficiency. They were individually small, as armored vehicles went, too small for anyone to even ride on their sides. Nonetheless, each packed power equivalent to a main battle tank and the ability to survive anti-tank ordinance that would crumple a conventional armored platform four times its size and ten times it weight.

Further back in the ship, twenty two men and women were anxiously prepping their gear and muttering about rumors as their situation developed in stark and shocking detail. They were in varying states of battle dress and bore expressions ranging from grim acceptance to muted distress to fuming anger. Exactly thirty minutes ago, they had been woken up if off duty, or alerted if on duty, and mustered to form an immediate emergency relief mission. There had been no time for normal mission briefings or the typical dissemination of information. Only the officers knew, and even then only in part, exactly what was going on.

Captain Bruce Banks stood in the center of the ship, brown eyes dark with determination and cold fury. The dark skinned American looked out over the assembled soldiers, Seiran Mountain's finest, and nodded imperceptibly to himself. Without even asking, without so much as raising his voice, he had everyone's full attention. A few feet behind him, Captain Ben-Solomon had his helmet on, communicating directly with Command and Control back at the base.

"Alright, listen up," Banks spoke up, his deep voice filling the cramped confines of the Avenger. "At twenty three twenty hours our Wyndham base in northern Australia detected multiple enemy incursions in allied Earth airspace on a vector towards the Indian Ocean from the South Pole. They were able to identify these as an assault wing of six alien battleships and three terror craft."

There was a sharp intake of breath, shared by many in that confined space.

No one had ever detected such a large scale single incursion by the enemy. Rarely, battleships would sortie in groups of three or four, as they had when assaulting Morlenbach several years ago, and on occasion terror ships would do likewise if striking a particularly juicy target or expecting interference from X-COM. A wave of no less than nine assault craft was unheard of.

Banks continued after a moment of letting the severity of the situation sink in. "That isn't the half of it, boys and girls. Two of those craft, a terror ship and battleship, turned to engage Wyndham while the other seven continued towards the Middle East. At twenty three twenty four, our time, Duiwelskloof confirmed another alien incursion off the coast of South Africa: six abductor class craft and an escort of four large scouts."

He took a deep breath, and, impossibly, continued to dispense bad news.

"Ten minutes later, Valencia detected another incursion above Antarctica, heading towards South America. Hyperwave decoding identified three battleship class craft and one supply ship. At almost the same time, with Europe on high alert, they detected an attempted stealth incursion in one of our old blind spots over the central Atlantic Ocean. It was an identical strike force headed for Irhil M'Goun."

"At this very moment," Banks explained, "Wyndham, Irhil M'Goun, and El Dorado are all under attack by alien forces. Four alien battleships have also begun engaging Coalition forces in the Middle East, and within minutes, we expect two terror ships to land within the city limits of Baghdad. Despite the destruction of all four of their escorts by fighters launched from Duiwelskloof, we also estimate that the terror forces in Iraq will be joined by the four abductors moving up the east African coast inside fifteen minutes."

"Sir," Lieutenant Stirling of Foxtrot Squad spoke up, everyone else still stunned silent. He was American, clean shaven, with fair hair cut short and a serious demeanor. Stirling was a demolitions specialist and had been a squad leader for almost two years.

"If we were scrambled to assist Wyndham and similar forces were sent to assist Irhil M'Goun and El Dorado from US and Europe…" Stirling trailed off at the end. He seemed to have already guessed what the answer to his question would be.

"For the time being, Command is not providing ground support for our relief efforts in Baghdad," Banks replied evenly. "We will attempt to provide air support when the battleships have landed. The rest of you have probably guessed what that means for us... After this assignment, we will immediately be transferred to assist in the containment of the Baghdad terror site. Until that time, the city will have to hunker down and try and survive."

* * *

**The Road to Cydonia **

Chapter XXXIII

_Auribus Teneo Lupum_

* * *

Written by:

Capn Chryssalid

* * *

"I am now activating India Squad," Ryouga's voice came in clearly over the encrypted hyperwave communications net. "Nabiki, I'm going to be running our briefing entirely over the HUD."

"I can handle it," she assured him from her desk at the Floor, back in Seiran.

The atmosphere there was professional, but it didn't take a trained empath to detect the undercurrent of anxiety in the control center. For her part, Nabiki tried to keep calm and handle the night one problem at a time. Above all, she tried not to think about the other XCOM bases under attack, or the massive terror site in the Middle East. One crisis at a time; anything more than that and it just became too emotionally overwhelming to consider.

Ryu, Kuno, and Mousse (the latter running a bit late) keyed in, logging onto their Watchman Accounts. The programs recorded their gear loadout via Smartlink and patched them into the TeamComm encrypted communications network. It also recorded their battle data: everything they saw, heard and did, along with their vital signs and other information. Everything was recorded and sent on to HQ for analysis and archiving.

"Everyone ready?" she asked, as the last of them got their helmets on. The 'buckets' were usually the last bit of gear the guys put on. Everything else would already be keyed and ready to authenticate.

"Ready," Ryouga confirmed.

"Yep," Ryu replied.

"Good to go." Mousse.

Kuno was the last to respond. "Yes. Ready."

"Loading profiles," Nabiki said, and her screen registered the individual weapon manifest of each UNETCO soldier in India Squad. Mousse, as usual, carried the most gear, and his profile took a second longer than the others to fully authenticate. The computer double checked the information with the data from the Armory Archives, and one by one the devices pinged green.

"Weapons are now hot," Nabiki advised. "Everything's green. We're good to go."

"Good. I am now activating our Black Boxes," Ryouga spoke up, starting the mission briefing. "Nabiki, bring up the following and prioritize it in this order: a full map of the area surrounding Wyndham, the latest tactical update on Wyndham base, and a topographic map of the local Sector 2-B. I also want a live oversight map available at all times."

"The recon drones aren't in the area yet, and our normal sats are being jammed," Nabiki explained, "But I'll have that feed as soon as I can. In the meantime... let me get that other stuff."

It took about fifty seconds to find, load, and prioritize the requested data. As Consultant for India Squad, Nabiki had become familiar with the systems used to manage data upload and download. It was a critical part of her job to provide instant access to any mission relevant data, to provide aid to the squad's commanding officer, and to support anti-psionic countermeasures. Luckily, she'd gotten pretty good at it. She was also the only one who could effectively talk India Squad's CO out of getting lost if he became isolated.

The main map appeared on the screen on her left, and she took a moment to study it. Wyndham was located in Kakadu National Park, in a heavily converted uranium mine built in the 70s. Like most UNETCO facilities, it was hidden on government owned land. Nabiki remembered the so called "Bird Sanctuary" they'd hidden El Dorado under, back when she'd first learned of XCOM; bases almost always had a public face like that and Wyndham was no different. It had been considered still secret and undetected by the enemy. Obviously Intel had dropped the ball there and that information was out of date now.

Above ground, Wyndham had originally consisted of a few small buildings, an inactive ore processing site, a large bunker, open air excavation pits, and a flanking body of water filling a rectangular basin. The land around it was mostly scrub and bush. It was rocky and rough terrain, rolling but not terribly hilly. It was also tucked away between two large rocky outcroppings to the west and south. To be exact: this was how it **had** been.

The latest recon images painted a slightly different picture.

Wyndham had a Grav shield and two sets of self contained base defenses in the form of Plasma Cannons. These had been located within concealed and armored spiderholes to the north and east of the base itself. Both had been hit hard by the alien battleship on its main approach; Turret A was a glowing molten streak that resembled nothing more than a splash of yellow paint on an orange and brown canvas. The aliens rarely turned their weapons on the surface of the Earth, but when they did, their power became quite clear.

Turret B had fared no better. While not totally annihilated, the area around it had been melted and fused into glass and silica, and the armored turret itself blown apart from the inside. A long dark plume of smoke rose up from the ruins. Another shot from the alien craft, this one partly off target on Turret B, slashed a long burning scar in the Earth that extended for half a mile.

The base itself had been physically breached: a pin point strike had sliced open the main access elevator and another had torn open the armored doors of Hangar One. The alien battleship now rested, like a three story silver discus, where the old above ground administration building had once been. It had disgorged its troops, who quickly followed up their assault on Wyndham proper. Luckily, the base (like all UNETCO bases since the fall of Morlenbach) had been designed with multiple chokepoints to slow or thwart an attacker.

"The situation isn't pretty down there," Ryouga said, having explained most of the situation to India Squad. He also seemed to be trying to win an award for understatement. "Nabiki, highlight the Terror Ship."

She did so. The ship in question had crashed some eleven miles from Wyndham. It had taken the brunt of the base defenses, including being forcibly repelled by the Grav shield, but the aliens built their ships tough. It was mostly intact and had managed a semi-controlled landing.

"Intel believes that up to 80 percent of the crew of this ship are still combat capable," the lost one continued, "Hyperwave decoding has also confirmed that this ship is exclusively crewed by Ethereals, and that they are set to make their way to assist in the attack on Wyndham. They are also likely to be providing additional psionic support for the Mutons and Ethereals making the base assault. Our job will be to engage them, stop them, and then destroy them."

"Nabiki," he then addressed her. "Overlay the tactical assessment from Recon. What do they have on likely points of approach?"

"Gimme a second," she replied, checking for that. "Ok. Got it."

The map overlaid with several lines, representing vectors of approach given the terrain. Ryouga would have already seen this map from when Colonel Banks handed out the squad assignments. It looked like there were three main approaches to the base: one hooked around a large hill strewn with broken rock, another paralleled a road, and another snaked down around the south.

"We are going to take this hill to the north, here, designated P-17," Ryouga said, highlighting the point on the shared map with a ping. "Our main targets are the enemy Sectopods. We are to engage them with heavy lasers and special techniques and pinpoint them for blaster bomb strikes. Heavy resistance is to be expected. Alpha and Bravo Squads will be handling the other two approaches. Charlie will spearhead containment of the landed battleship. Delta will be support, but remember that Kinoshida's squad is still pretty green."

Delta Squad, formerly under the command of Lieutenant Lofquist, had taken heavy losses over the last few months. Sergeant Kinoshida had inherited the squad and reformed it, but all three of the new members were fresh out of regular special forces and basic UNETCO retraining. Normally, new squads would cut their teeth on a few downed UFO recovery missions before getting put up against terror units, much less terror units made up of _god damned Ethereals_.

" All the other squads are relieving the base directly. Now, we'll have two HWPs in addition to our personal loadout," Ryouga continued. "One plasma-type and one fusion ball. I want the fusion ball launcher set up as a reserve. The plasma type, we can put out front once we've sited a nice spot for it."

Nabiki quickly keyed up the two HWPs in question. They were being transported over on another ship, one of the Type-2 Lightning strike craft, along with Delta Squad. Both were hover platforms, and could be effectively air dropped once a site had been cleared. India Squad had been given Seiran's only Fusion Ball HWP; standard procedure generally favored giving individual troopers blaster bomb launchers. The thought was that, in terms of space, a HWP really only had one fourth the firepower of four men with Blaster Bomb Launchers. The upside was that the HWP was automated and not everyone was proficient in using the "Golden BBs" (or "Silver Footballs," as the Americans often called them).

"Our fire teams are Mousse and Kuno and Ryu and myself," Ryouga added. "The usual setup. We'll advance ahead with the plasma HWP. You guys find a spot for your HWP and then join us. Remember: these are purely combat-class Ethereals, not the types we've been fighting before. You can expect a barrage of uninterrupted psionic attacks from the moment we engage to the moment we head back home. Watch your HUD, listen to Nabiki, and remember your training."

"Yes, sir!" three voices chorused.

A second later, Ryouga asked, "Are you ready, Nabiki? We'll be relying on you."

Nabiki blinked, momentarily confused. She hadn't really thought he'd been referring to her before. But, then, she was part of the team, wasn't she?

"You can count on me, lost boy," she said with a smirk. "I'll keep you boys pointed in the right direction."

"I trust thou are not relying on thy moral compass for our bearings?"

"Stuff it, Kuno-chan."

The five members of India Squad laughed while they could, and it felt good.

* * *

The human sense of smell really wasn't worth much, in Zraz's opinion, but as blunt and in-acute as it was, it could still pick up the stinking wrongness of the figure before him. This particular Deep One was supposed to be what the "localized" alien colonists considered subtle and discrete. It was just the sort of backwards abomination Zraz expected out of them.

The thing was hideous and coming from an alien trapped in human form, that was saying something. Its skin was pasty and too-thin, semi transparent like some kind of deep sea fish, and devoid of hair. The once-human eyes now bulged out of their sockets and looked to be wracked by cataracts. Thankfully, the thing kept itself wrapped in rags and heavy clothes that looked to have been scavenged from some abandoned fisherman's shack or wharf. They probably had been, actually. To top it off, the damned thing still stunk of salt spray and rotting fish.

Zraz, like almost all Mars-bred aliens, knew very little of their "on planet" kin. Which was ironic, really, since part of their mandate in the solar system was to assist the crashed colonists. That had been a couple hundred thousand years ago. Primitive sentient life had been developing, and the Martian Mind had decided to let things play out before reinitiating colonization, since the new human-creatures had potential that could be nurtured and cultivated. The Old Mind, already damaged and all but inoperative, had been kept in long term sleep mode. In fact, Zraz had even heard via the Mind that many Ethereals thought that it was outright malfunctioning, or, some whispered, even insane.

Regardless, all the on-planet colonists had remained in stasis.

This was why contact with the T'leth colonists was all but rumor to most of the Mars born. That part of the overall operation was really in the hands of the Sectoids, and _they_ seemed more interested in hybridizing humanity than going through the trouble of bringing their primitive colonist cousins back up to code and re-integrating them into the Mind. Zraz had known some of this ever since gaining Command rank. Some of it was information uploaded into him by the Mind, and some of it was hearsay from other Commanders.

He really hadn't cared or put much stock in it before.

Zraz had been born and bred to be a field operative and military officer. He wasn't supposed to be a planetside administrator. The Mind had loaded all the relevant information into him, and he had accepted his new role, but it didn't really suit him that well. Dealing with this backwater Deep One was just the latest example of why he looked forward to finishing his latest tour of duty. Being human - physically - was something he had mostly gotten used to (it actually wasn't all that bad), but the work was grating sometimes.

The Deep One stared at him, unblinking, as it contemplated his requests. The colonists had a long established connection to some of the bizarre human religions planetside. The Mars Mind had never devoted a lot of effort into that sort of thing, but the T'leth Mind had made it a priority. Despite only operating at minimal levels, it still had resources and work of its own to do, and it had been sticking its fingers in certain world affairs for a very long time.

I was _supposed_ to only set up and maintain the oceanic Synodium Devices.

T'leth was technically responsible for maintaining those twelve Synodium Devices, but it always found time to stick its malformed nose in terrestrial business, too. The Mars Mind kept everything running smoothly, but its ancient predecessor found little niches where there wasn't existing overlap. It kept the Synodium devices ready, of course, although the master controls were all coded to the Mind on Mars. Without them, and without the Molecular Control Network, the terraforming process would take centuries. Twelve was the minimum they needed online, but they'd probably double it before the actual process began in earnest. That way it could all be done in less than a year.

Molecular Control was an old technology. As old as the Sectoids, which meant it was far, far older than the Snakemen. In modern times, it was only used for large scale terraforming. It wasn't meant to be used on an individual level like these colonists were doing. When the Mind had uploaded that bit of information - that the T'leth aliens were using Molecular Control on themselves - Zraz had been shocked. When he saw Jyusenkyou, he knew it was some sort of malfunctioning Molecular Control, but he hadn't imagined that the damned colonists were actually purposefully trying to use it on themselves.

Madness.

The result was the disgusting abomination that stood nearby. Naturally, it had wanted to meet in an abandoned house near the water. The T'leth-spawned were like that. The darker and more secluded the location, the better, and wherever they went they brought a sense of decay and corruption. Zraz was not keen on seeing what kind of world they actually made when they got the green light from Mars to begin terraforming. These colonists weren't just backward, they were... _creepy_ and _bizarre_.

Which brought his thoughts back to why he was seeking them out. The T'leth aliens had their grubby like webbed claws in some of the more unusual religious activity world wide. They spread cults and strange artifacts among the humans, usually to twist or pervert them in one way or another. With normal alien-human operations in East Asia smashed six feet into the ground by UNETCO, and orders to "fill out" a new Sirius Group of sympathizers, Zraz had decided to make use of the what few existing unconventional resources they had left.

The mostly still-human Deep One held out a malformed hand. Twisted yellow digits held a black stone that throbbed and hummed. It was another unstable product of misused Molecular Control. Zraz had to keep from sighing. These damned colonials were going to kill themselves... and worse, ruin the planet for everyone else, Sectoid, Ethereal and Snakeman.

The black stone translated the garbled speech of the Deep One:

"It can be done. We can share. Asia. Asia is... important to us. We have much here. But... careful. Be careful. We do not want attention."

The Deep One cocked its head.

"I have been told. Told. Soon. The Synodium Devices are ready."

"Only your twelve," Zraz reminded the creature. "If you start them up now, you can bet you'll get some attention. The Mind wants everything set up before you get the go ahead codes."

The Deep One shuddered, foam forming at the edge of its twisted mouth.

"Waiting. Waiting. So long. Waiting."

"We'll have things wrapped up planet-side in half a year," Zraz assured him. It. Whatever the formerly human fish thing was. "We can start up the Molecular Control Network in a year, maybe two. But for the time being, let's talk... cults. I'm thinking: a new Cult of Sirius. Something more subtle, something that can use our contacts in the existing human organizations."

The vile abomination bared its pointy teeth in what could almost be a smile.


	98. Auribus Teneo Lupum II

**Quick Notes:**

Seems some of my readers have caught onto my schedule when it comes to posting chapters. Let me clarify: yes, I upload chapters in clusters. This is because I first write a full chapter (usually about 40 or 50 pages) and upload it in "parts," hence why each chapter name is followed by an I or II or III. I'm doing this because it is my experience that people in FFN prefer more succinct chapters that update more frequently. Even then, I've had at least one person complaining that the chapters are still too long (nonsense in my opinion). I also tend to upload chapter parts over the weekend, starting on a Friday. It did make me smile to realize some people had picked out my personal preferences over the course of watching this story update for several years now.

* * *

Juliet Squad advanced deeper into the Wyndham Base, Ranma taking lead.

Shampoo followed close behind with Ukyou at the rear of the formation. While India had been detailed to assist in intercepting the advancing enemy reinforcements outside the base, Juliet had been ordered to enter the facility and relieve what was left of the defenders inside while clearing it over alien infestation. The aliens first target once inside had been the Mind Shield, and with it down they were able to psionically interfere with communications throughout the area.

"Expect uninterrupted psionic interference."

That had been the phrase bandied about by command and the squad leaders. Ukyou hadn't felt too worried by it at the time. They had trained extensively over the months to resist psionic attacks and suggestions and they had had plenty of sorties against psionic Sectoids and even a number of Ethereals. How bad could it be?

The muffled sound of gunshots mingled with the low beeping of her psionic detection alarm. It was all in her head. There were no gunshots. Probably. There was almost no way to tell for sure. Training had taught them to trust in their instruments and in their instincts. Instinct was a natural defense against psionic suggestion and manipulation. For a martial artist, trusting in instinct was easy, so Ukyou relied on her _sakkijutsu_, and it told her there were no gunshots in the distance.

There was no movement behind that wall or on the periphery of her vision.

Those shadows weren't really moving.

That wasn't a pair of eyes, watching her from the other side of that office window.

Those weren't soft footsteps behind her, stopping intermittently.

She wasn't afraid of this place.

Flickering lights cast her two teammates in sharp relief, and Ukyou and Shampoo stopped and moved when Ranma motioned for them to take supporting positions. They knew the drill and followed orders instantly and without hesitation. Ranma wasn't their fiancé here, he was their leader, their lieutenant, and he would see them through this horrible place.

The three breached one of Wyndham's formerly sealed residential units, emergency authorization codes giving them access to the entire facility. It was a carbon copy of the housing facilities at Seiran - all XCOM bases used the same basic blueprints and were constructed in a modular fashion - and Ukyou found herself feeling almost at home. Except these rooms were eerie and empty of life. They came on a unit, much like the one Ukyou knew Genma and Nodoka stayed in, but... it wasn't their room. She saw a flash of blue, but knew it wasn't Nodoka, coming to greet her guests.

"Clear," Ranma announced. "Keep focused."

Shampoo quickly completed the check of the attached rooms, finding nothing.

"That's the last potential intrusion point we've been able to identify. The rest of the rooms are all locked." Rachael, their coordinator back at Seiran, spoke to them over the TeamComm. While Ranma led them in the field, Rachael provided critical information support and kept them on track with mission updates. Actual command in the field was thus a something of a synergy between commanders and their supporting tech.

"Then we'll move on to the next level," Ranma decided. "Still no word from the panic rooms?"

"Nothing, Lieutenant. Almost the entire network here is down except for the encrypted security archives and the local monitoring stations."

"Gotcha. Keep at it." Ranma motioned his subordinates to follow, and they joined Ukyou in the main hallway. The lights flickered again, and Ukyou felt a rumble, like an oncoming train. It was all in her mind. Tightening her grip on her plasma carbine, she licked her lips. Her ammunition supply was highlighted; she hadn't fired a single shot yet.

They hadn't even found the enemy yet and she found herself hating this mission more than any other. Alien feelings: fear, mental exhaustion, anxiety, anger... Ukyou could feel them being pulled out of her mind. It had been like that for what seemed like hours. It wasn't a psionic attack like before. It wasn't a like a blow, but rather a creeping violation. There was something vast and terrible here, and it was in no rush to bear down on her.

Like all UNETCO bases, Wyndham was set up in rows and corridors, with the modular base facilities set up so it was easy for defenders to set up chokepoints. The last reliable Intel had indicated that, despite retreating deeper into the base, there were still XCOM units fighting deep within the base. Juliet was just one of several squads moving to assist them, but they now found themselves taking the same routes an invading alien enemy would.

They needed to be cautious.

Ukyou found herself wishing Konatsu was back on his feet and out of the medical bay. The squad really wasn't the same without him. He was a superb point man, able to scout ahead easily, setting a pace they were all happy with. Ranma always seemed to either go too slow or too fast. Ukyou could tell he was in a hurry, but that every time he rush ahead, he found himself questioning his pace and whether it was dangerously reckless or sloppy. No doubt, if Ranma had been here by himself, he would have rushed ahead heedless of danger - but he was the leader of a squad, and responsible for them and for the mission as a whole.

"Got something!" he announced, and a second later, Ukyou heard a beep on her motion sensors. Juliet squad had been coming up on one of the security checkpoints and immediately found something to break the monotony.

It was a Muton, burned nearly to a crisp by plasma fire.

The hulking alien was the size of a very large man, seemingly naked. Its armor and its skin were one and the same, and provided for an amazing level of protection. They were foot soldiers for the Ethereals, genetically and cybernetically enhanced to wage war. This one had run afoul of at least two direct heavy plasma rounds, enough firepower to burn away what looked like thirty or forty percent of its substantial mass, despite the natural armor.

The checkpoint up ahead was a crumpled mess of shredded metal.

The aliens had burned and blasted their way through, and Ukyou could see more Muton bodies, and pieces of bodies, nearby. Red and black stained the walls. A mute statue burned near the rubble. It was a suit of powered armor, still on its feet, bits of flame and smoke rising from where it had been breached. A heavy plasma rifle hung, just barely, from a strap around the torso, one hand still on the trigger.

_'Help me...'_

That wasn't a voice she just heard.

_'It hurts. Help me...'_

Her instincts blared a warning, and Ukyou moved, immediately swinging her battle spatula to cover her side. Ranma and Shampoo also made sounds of surprise as a combination of plasma fire and something else came from behind a fallen sheet of alien alloy. Returning fire as she found cover against the wall, Ukyou could see a green skinned shape ducking low and taking shots at them. A bolt of plasma tore into the flat of her spatula, dissipating but leaving a scar in the specialized weapon.

There was something else, too. She could feel it.

Her eyes trailed around the scene, the world slowing as her martial senses kicked in. There! Adjusting her aim away from the obvious target, the Muton, she unloaded a trio of semiautomatic shots at a darkened corner. Something indistinct, pressed up against the wall and hidden in a corner, moaned in her mind.

Celatid.

There were almost certainly more, too.

"Celatids!" she warned, backing up. An instant later, sickly green globules rained down from the far side of the room, following a shallow arc. Ukyou deftly avoided the corrosive projectiles, spinning in place to reorient her spatula to cover her other side and intercept another plasma bolt.

A scream split the air, and the Muton stumbled back, one arm shielding its face.

Shampoo had scored a hit, burning away most of the creature's face down to the skull. It was still up and alive, however, and bringing its weapon to bear, firing blindly. Two shots from Ranma's plasma carbine downed the alien, leaving the three members of Juliet squad to focus on the hidden Celatid threat.

This was much less serious now.

Ukyou saw one of the floating fleshbags, dodged another glob of spit, and took it out with a snap shot. Ranma and Shampoo also advanced, easily able to dodge the projectiles and shoot down the Celatid ambushers. They were strange creatures: terror units used by the Mutons. They resembled nothing so much as a giant pulsating kidney or liver. Intel believed them to be mindless killing constructs, capable only of attacking living beings and budding like amoebas.

Their spit - a corrosive "universal solvent" - was deadly even to powered armor. It would break down matter rapidly into a smattering of carbon and organic residue, and the way the projectile came apart in midair would make it all but impossible to normally dodge, especially in a firefight. Juliet squad was far from normal, however, and to the three martial artists the rain of acid was easy enough to weave through.

As the last Celatid splattered, exploding as plasma superheated its insides, Juliet squad dove to cover. There was more incoming. A bolt of plasma hit the wall to Ukyou's right, scorching the alien alloy. Those were too fast to avoid - faster even than a bullet. They were getting better at "reading" the intent of the shots, however, even from aliens. That was the real trick to using _sakkijutsu_ to dodge an arrow from behind or a bullet from point blank range.

**My center of mass.**

Ukyou's form blurred as she moved to the side.

**My lower torso.**

Bringing her battle spatula to block, Ukyou returned fire.

"Shampoo! Suppression fire!" Ranma's orders were followed without hesitation. "Ukyou, you're with me!"

Leaping over a charred security cordon and through a shattered blast wall, the two martial artists ducked low. Shampoo's ranged fire tore through the air overhead, forcing the Mutons to pull back and slow their own attack. Ukyou felt Ranma's own battle intentions, jumping ahead and covering Ranma as the two of them closed the distance of twenty feet under fire in a second and a half.

Back to back, Ukyou blocked two plasma blasts from one of the aliens. She and Ranma spun in midair and then on the ground. A blinding _Kenran_ _Hinode_ seared the entire area around the two of them, and Ranma's "sticky grenade" _ki_ blasts bounced wildly away from the two martial artists, hitting two Mutons crouched behind cover and another in the open. The aliens howled as the _ki_ adhered to their bodies, burning and hissing with termite-like intensity. Blinded and roasting from the attacks, the aliens nonetheless retaliated, firing with heavy and medium plasmas.

A single shot from one of the heavies would be fatal, and even a medium could kill through personal armor. Ukyou and Ranma broke apart and avoided the first rush of shots with superhuman speed. Their carbines flashed as they fired, nailing the standing Muton four times in the chest, and one of the crouching ones twice in the face, disintegrating its skull entirely in a spray of gore. The third managed to get totally behind cover - ducking back behind an overturned weapons locker.

With a growl, Ranma sprung and struck the man sized locker itself.

It flattened against the wall as if hit by a car, deforming from the impact and crushing the Muton behind it. Ukyou knew the blow, easily sufficient to kill a human, wouldn't be nearly enough to finish off this particular breed of alien. Pulling the crumpled metal away, Ranma shot to his side, avoiding a blast of green death before stepping in close and disarming the alien by twisting its grip on the rifle and snapping its fingers.

A hard elbow to the temple deformed the wall behind the alien's skull and stunned it. A pinpoint blast to the face with his plasma carbine finished the job. The Muton twitched, still trying to fight even with most of its brains decorating the scenery. It took a step forward, swiped with one arm, and fell forward. Dispatching a Muton in hand to hand was all but unheard of - they were many times stronger than a human, and vastly more resilient. They were, for all intents and purposes, the alien equivalent of a powered armored trooper.

Ranma had all but torn it apart in hand to hand.

Last on the scene, Shampoo walked up, busily reloading her rifle.

"I didn't get even one?" she Chinese girl asked, sounding a little put out. "I know I hit at least two of them."

"Stay sharp. They know we're here now, so be ready for anything." Ranma inclined his head, the helmet catching a bit of flickering light. He took a moment to reload his carbine as well, and so did Ukyou, while Shampoo stood watch.

Ahead of them was the main access way to the engineering facilities.

Wyndham's inner facilities were set up in quadrants, with a circular access hall connecting them. There were three wings in all, oriented north, south and east. Two were manufacturing facilities. Wyndham hadn't been expected to carry heavy combat operations in something like a year, so it was instead used for manufacturing, stockpiling, and basic research. It was mundane stuff by UNETCO standards, based on their briefing.

Wyndham manufactured laser weapons in large numbers, many for export ("sale" is another word) to allied nations. Much of the storage was used to support that, and large numbers of laser cannons and the like were kept in the adjoining warehouse space. The other major product was more benign: Wyndham was a major manufacturer of medical kits and other pharmaceuticals, and much of its research was also medical in scope and design.

There were two ways down to the engineering and research level: the first was the secondary access lift. It was a large elevator for bulk transport that itself connected to the external access lift. The base's defense lockdown had hard sealed the entire lift complex, shutting it down and sealing it off. The only viable way to progress deeper into the base was a descending incline from one level to another.

The UNETCO defenders had obviously made a stand here, after the aliens took out the two adjacent security cordons. Juliet squad was making better progress than Hotel or Foxtrot, and were the first to find the macabre scene. The walls of the open space bore the marks of the firefight that had taken place: there were charred alien corpses from where the enemy had been cut down. Deeper still, towards the bottom of the incline, there were smashed automated defenses and the bodies of slain comrades.

The smoldering wreckage of a hastily emplaced HWP lay next to two armored bulkheads. Ukyou knew the type from Seiran. They could be pulled out of the floor and locked in place, giving you some cover to fight from behind. The defenders here had taken a toll on the aliens but ultimately ended up overwhelmed. There were telltale signs of multiple plasma grenades having gone off and maybe even a blaster bomb. Those not inside powered armor were all but unrecognizable in the grim melee.

That wasn't a scream she just heard.

Ranma led them past the carnage to one of the labs that Rachel and Seiran Command identified as having been breached. The circular venue that led to the labs had been sealed with blast doors, but the aliens had nonetheless advanced in good order. Juliet squad passed a set of doors that hadn't been fully closed and slipped through without incident. Up ahead and to the left was a larger vault like apparatus, leading to the east wing. It looked open and undamaged.

"Careful," Ranma warned. "I gotta bad feelin' about this."

Ukyou was tempted to note that she'd been getting a bad feeling about this place since they landed. Shampoo just huffed, her voice cracking in and out too quickly over the TeamComm audio. Pushing the vault doors open wide, Ranma motioned for them to follow and cover his sides. Inside, they found themselves in a main reception area, with dull un-lit signs indicating sub-wings of the lab complex. There were six in all, divided by three floors. Each research department had exactly four individual laboratories, making for a grand total of twenty four.

Only the unsealed areas would need to be searched.

"We're short one, so we'll have to improvise," Ranma observed, retrieving a small device from his belt: a single M86 Proximity-Detonated Mine. "Ukyou. I want a claymore up by the entrance there... and hook an alarm into it. I want to know the moment it goes off. And set up a quick disable for when we double back. I don't want it slowing us down when we head out."

She nodded, getting to work.

Ranma held onto his M86, and Shampoo guarded their position. Ukyou was the demolitions handler for Juliet, and she worked quickly, setting an M18A1 to cover the vulnerable entrance. Setting it up to a surveillance alarm came next. Area-denial was a common tactic in XCOM, and UFO entrances and exits were frequently mined by cunning teams who knew the aliens could rarely resist slipping out to cause mischief. Tactically, the enemy also liked to attack from behind, making deterrent mines very attractive.

"Done!" Ukyou announced, and stepped back as Ranma tossed his M86 near the door for added measure. The pyramid shaped explosive required very little finesse - a few seconds after hitting the ground and activating, it shot out several ultra-fine tripwires that stuck to walls and anything nearby. It was less powerful than a Claymore, but didn't need any prep time.

"Should we split up?" Shampoo asked, relaxing a fraction. There was only one way in or out of the lab, and it was now trapped. Ukyou could understand why her teammate felt a bit relieved. The unending whispers and psionic interference, however, tempered any attempt at relief.

"No. Not with all this," Ranma tapped the side of his helmet. He was obviously referring to the very same psionic assault Ukyou had been mindful of. "We're sticking together, but I am upping the pace a bit."

Both girls nodded.

"Let's go," he ordered, turning and leading them to the first laboratory department identified as compromised: the diagnostics division. It was laid out very simply, just like all the labs. There was a connecting hallway with the lab rooms branching off from it at regular intervals. The lights were out, leaving a curtain of darkness broken only by the near dead glow of computer screens and independent battery powered lights and lamps.

Ukyou and Ranma checked the first open lab and the latter winced at the sight. There were dogs, maybe five or six of them, in a kennel of sorts. All had been killed. Lowering her rifle a bit to get a closer look while Ranma and Shampoo swept the area, Ukyou could confirm that they had been shot at point blank range. Plasma weapons. They had been large breed dogs but the weapons hadn't left much to identify.

'Why kill them?' she wondered, looking around for some sort of answer. The aliens had obviously gone out of their way to hit this lab, but nothing else seemed damaged or hacked into.

"Anything?" she asked, her _sakkijutsu_ silent for the moment.

"Nothing," Ranma replied, heading for the door. "Let's finish up."

"I have something!" Shampoo suddenly interrupted. "Heading our way! Down the hall!"

The rest of the squad quickly moved to cover the hallway, moving with lightning speed. Ukyou's motion sensor also picked it up: at least one contact moving at low speed, heading west towards them. What they actually saw, however, was no alien.

"Help... me..."

The man was leaning against the wall, blood streaming down his left leg, staining the white lab coat red. He was obviously wounded, and Ranma cursed. It was one of the base civvies.

"Shit! We've got wounded!" His shoulders slumped slightly as he quickly switched to external speakers. "Shampoo, Medikit! Sir, are you ok? Are you alone?"

That wasn't footsteps Ukyou heard behind them.

_"No,"_ the man said, looking up at them. _"Not... alone..."_

It hit Ranma like one of Akane's slaps to the face. Even several feet away, Ukyou could feel the psionic bolt slam into their leader, paralyzing his mind and body. It felt cold and poisonous and hateful, and a cold shiver ran down her spine.

The man's hand turned, revealing something round in it.

"No!" Shampoo cried, and tried to raise her rifle to take a shot.

A second later, a flash of bright light, and there was only darkness.

* * *

India Squad was the 'heavy assault' squad of the two, and for good reason. As suited as it was for rapid advances against the enemy in close quarters, it was equally effective out in the open. All four members had trained extensively to utilize their most destructive techniques under different conditions. Still: one could rightly ask, why was India outside Wyndham instead of inside?

"Bakusai Tenketsu."

Sundered tree trunks and some forty tons of stone and earth rained down from a trio of earth shattering explosions. Bits of scrub and bush fell like hailstones amid the resulting cloud of dust, and fingernail sized bits of branch and rock landed half a mile away. One lone tree pirouetted through the air end over end, a ragged maze of roots shedding dirt from the force that had uprooted and thrown it. By lucky happenstance it landed square on one of Ryouga's targets.

The old tree split in half at it crushed the Sectopod.

The alien war machine was little perturbed by the impact, however, as it focused more on extracting itself from the pitfall it had ended up in. The explosion itself was merely inconvenient to the machine; it in no way possessed the force needed to truly damage it. The problems arose from being tossed into the air or falling into the array of depressions that has suddenly formed underfoot.

A moment later, a fusion ball zipped down, made an abrupt right turn, followed by another, before slamming into the slightly more lightly armored rear of the trapped terror unit. A steaming hot cocktail of anti-matter and matter met, fused, and released its energy right into the Sectopod's aft compartment. This, the armored terror unit could not fully resist. The top half of the walker tore apart into three larger pieces, one of which went up in a secondary explosion.

The second Sectopod, still rolling from the massive explosion that went off underfoot, finally managed to stomp one foot down and cut short its momentum. Readjusting and compensating for the attack, its psionic sensors picked up sentient presences nearby. Trying to get up on both feet to pivot and engage, a blue flash raced by. The Sectopod fired a combination of flares and plasma grenades at the proximity warning, surrounding it with an expanding wave of sunfire and radiation.

As the dust and fire began to clear, the Sectopod toppled forward.

Damage warnings blared in the semi-presence that guided the device. It was not an Artificial Intelligence - it was a literal intelligence, a fragment of an ethereal, an avatar, given purpose and knowledge. Like all the Ethereal's preferred minions, it was a proxy for their will; a body they could use and throw away. At the moment, this Sectopod's body was in trouble. Something had severed critical mechanical components in both of its legs, very nearly cutting them in half.

Another shape blurred overhead.

Four thunderous explosions bloomed along the crippled Sectopod's back, each sufficient to flip an armored APC ten feet into the air under different circumstances. Even the hardy construction of the alien menace crumpled under the conditions just subjected to it. The Sectopod was almost instantly reduced to an unrecognizable mess of burning, twisted metal.

Mousse and Kuno didn't stop moving.

A staccato drumbeat of plasma fire came from downrange. Trees exploded from the inside and ground turned into scorch marks of black and red glass. A blaster bomb went off near a position on one of the flanking hillsides, turning it into a crater large enough to park a car in. A battery of return fire streaked overhead at mach seven, leaving nothing more than a trail of superheat air, turned to steam, in its wake. Blaster bombs etched these marks overhead, cutting up the sky into jigsaw shapes.

Ryouga and Ryu crossed Kuno and Mousse's vector, blurring as they ran at over fifty miles per hour. The _Yamasenken_ master jumped, kicking with his feet before landing, and scythes of cutting vacuum held together by _ki_ saturated an area up ahead. Indistinct shapes moved like ghosts, titian colored mirages against the battered landscape. Deadly accurate plasma fire came within half a foot of the martial artist's landing spot, forcing Ryu to roll and bail off to the side.

Ryouga landed on all fours, and a jolt of furious green energy ripped through the earth, growing faster and faster as it streaked towards its target. Once there, the ground contracted, as if inhaling, before exploding outwards like the face of a volcano. Ghostly shapes moved through the explosion, floating and zipping through the air in defiance of gravity and natural law.

Mousse's sleeves rippled, unleashing a cone of fire to cover their advance. The ball of sticky, caustic thermobaric death washed over the area, finally revealing the clouded face of the crashed Terror Ship. Even half smashed by Wyndham's base defenses, it resembled nothing less than the gaping mouth of hell. Fire and smoke rose from the hole blasted in its middle, and a literal barrage of enemy fire came from deep within.

"That's a lot of fire!" Ryu dryly observed.

Mousse gave a satisfied snort. "Not for long. They've been painted! Incoming!"

Two more blaster bombs curved up and into the now revealed and sighted hole in the alien ship. Massive explosions gutted the vessel from the inside, peeling away bits of ship-class alien alloy armor. A psionic screech shot through all four members of India squad as one of the more powerful Ethereals, probably a leader, expired in a wall of crushing force and flame.

For a moment, the incessant psionic assault all four men felt faded, but then it snapped back in full force. The Ethereals were relentless. Shots and techniques went awry, missing when they should have hit. False readings and whispers made one question when the shot seemed genuine. Ryu even stumbled when he slammed into a rock that he hadn't seen. An ever increasing sense of dread, even in the face of what seemed like an allied advantage, wore at their minds.

This was what it meant to fight combat class Ethereals.

They were in your mind, sometimes two or three of them, probing and pushing for a way in. Sometimes they would just pass by, look for a weakness, and move on. Other times they would just keep pressing and pressing, the pressure building and building. Mousse hesitated as three of them suddenly focused on him.

"Mousse is being hit hard!" Nabiki warned them.

"On it!" Ryu barked, moving to tackle the stunned Chinese martial artist before he ended up shot. A plasma grenade spun through the air, landing nearby. The two barely managed to scramble away before it exploded, throwing molten metal and gas hotter than the sun across a two dozen square feet.

"Bravo and Charlie incoming!" India's controller quickly added. "Watch your six! Check your fire!"

Ryu and Mousse glanced up and saw titian robes...

No: they were too large, too bulky. The two blinked, and saw suits of MARS powered armor flying overhead. With the enemy sufficiently suppressed, they were swooping into deliver the _coup de grâce_. Green gas pellets blanketed the open face of the crashed alien ship, followed by powerful psionic attacks and direct injections of well heated plasma. Another Ethereal died, this one a lower ranked soldier, and it shrieked in Mousse's mind as its seemingly frail body burned down to the bone.

"India Squad, report."

"All quiet, lieutenant." Ryu then added, "Finally."

"It seems we finally shut them up," Mousse replied, referring to the unending psionic attacks.

"The more terrible the enemy defeated, the greater the glory!" Kuno trumpeted. "A worthy enterprise for my noble blade!"

"Form up and fall back," Ryouga ordered, turning and making for the rendezvous he just pinged. Nabiki routed the location to the HUD topographic maps on their helmet visors.

"What next?" Ryu asked as he ran. Next to him, Mousse was still shaking his head to clear the after effects of the psionic screech.

"We're going to make one last sweep to make sure the area is clear, then we support the Wyndham Assault teams. Anyone feeling fatigued?"

"A little winded," Mousse answered first. "But good to go."

"Sixty percent maybe." Ryu speculated.

"I have but scratched the surface of my legendary stamina, Lieutenant!"

"Good," Ryouga nodded to himself. "Ryu, you and Mousse swing around to the south. Make sure that hill is clear."

"It got nuked. I think its clear."

"Make sure. No survivors."

"_Hai_, Lieutenant," Ryu replied, his grin all but audible. India Squad could cover a lot of ground extremely quickly when it wanted to. Even giving the cratered and beaten hilltop a look through wouldn't take long.

"Kuno. Meet up with me and we'll head to the landed Avenger."

"As you say, lieutenant."

Ryouga finished handing out orders and took a moment to catch his breath. He keyed off the outgoing audio to the other three members of India as he focused on the steady intake of air. Not a surprise - he had used up more of his reserves than any of them. To make matters worse, the tissue damage from Cologne's blood vine was flaring up again, painful enough to evoke a wince from a man who trained by taking multi-ton boulders to the face.

'Damn you, Cologne...!'

"Lieutenant," Nabiki spoke up, interrupting his thoughts. He could have turned off his audio to her as well, but it wasn't prudent. Besides...

"I'm fine, Nabiki. I just need a few seconds."

She seemd to give him a second before speaking again, this time in a lighter tone. "I didn't know you could rearrange the landscape like that, Hibiki. You aren't going to pull out any of those little volcano-explosion-whatever blasts when we get back to Nerima, are you?"

"It isn't like I go out of my way to cause property damage, you know."

"No, those city blocks were just in the way of your mighty finger."

It was a silly statement, and against his prevailing mood, he grinned a bit.

"This isn't the sort of situation for holding back," he explained. "Naturally I'll be a bit more careful next time I fight Ranma near the dojo."

"See that you do, Mister Human Natural Disaster," Nabiki then asked, as if an afterthought. "How big of a breaking point can you make go boom, anyway?"

A sly smirk formed behind his helmet.

"It depends on the ground, but... pretty big." He switched topics, his tone turning professional again. "What's the status of the assault?"

Kuno appeared in a flash, his armor looking scuffed but none the worse for wear. He gestured with his index and middle finger, and Ryouga silently returned the greeting. The kendoist nodded, and headed for the landed Avenger at a brisk pace of twenty miles per hour. Ryouga followed carefully, always mindful of his... directional impairment.

"Not great," Nabiki answered, double checking her data back at Seiran. "Hotel and Golf are right where they're supposed to be, but that's no surprise there. Foxtrot is making its way to the engineering level. Echo is mopping up the hangar. Juliet is in the east lab. Still no word on survivors or whatever is left of the Wyndham squads."

"Did we knock out the enemy Commander?"

"The general psionic warning is still Class-A... so it doesn't look like it. The big bad is probably still in the battleship somewhere," Nabiki speculated. "Alpha and Delta squads are having a slow time of it in there. They'll probably requisition you guys to help."

"That bad?"

"Delta lost both its rookies," Nabiki explained, her voice tinged with concern. "Kinoshida's wounded, but still up and fighting."

"Delta's been getting hammered these last few ops."

Back at Seiran, Nabiki could only nod in silent agreement.

"Any news from the other bases? What about Iraq?"

"They aren't disseminating info on those sites yet. I could place a request...?"

"No. Don't bother. We'll find out eventually."

Together, he and Kuno slowed as they approached the landed Avenger. The pilot and copilot were the only two men on guard, testament to how stretched thin their squads were at the moment. Seiran had sortied every man and woman it could to relieve Wyndham, and what was left would head back only long enough to refuel before heading out to the mideast.

It was looking pretty rough.

Ryu and Mousse were also present, having arrived just moments before. The two members of India squad were standing next to the Avenger's copilot, talking with their helmet visor's transparent. Ryu was calm, but Mousse was also trying to fix some of the battle damage to his sleeves and robe. Leave it to the master of hidden weapons to have, of all things, _replacement robes_ hidden under his robes.

He briefly wondered if those robes had spare robes under them, too?

"India Squad is assembled and ready for reassignment," Ryouga announced up the chain of command. "Are we headed underground?"

A moment later, the response came in.

"Negative India." It was Captain Ben-Solomon. "We're pulling Delta out of the battleship assault. You are to move in and join Charlie in securing the second and third tiers."

"Opposition?"

"Medium. A mix of Ethereals and Mutons. Be advised we are using psionic attacks of our own on the Muton crew. Priority is on Ethereals and securing a line to their Commander. Expect heavy psionic interference."

"Yes, sir," Ryouga crisply replied. "We'll head over immediately."

It was Kuno, of all of them, that grunted at the immediate reassignment.

"No rest for the wicked, as they say," he muttered. "Although, naturally, I only come along because of my attachment to you roguish vagabonds. It is difficult being such an altruistic soul!"

"Roguish vagabonds?" Ryu asked with a small laugh. "Really?"

Mousse just retracted a hidden blade from his repaired sleeve.

"India Squad. We have our orders," Ryouga barked. "Ryu, take point! Let's get moving!'

The three martial artists nodded once, and took off, accelerating at superhuman speed. They'd be at the landed alien battleship in a minute and a half at a normal pace. Once there, it would be right back into the teeth of the enemy.

Wicked or not, there wouldn't be any rest for some time yet.

* * *

Irhil M'Goun was gone.

Commander Yasuda watched the live feed with a stony expression. UAV and satellite imagery revealed a massive blast crater and a collapsed wall of earth where the underground facility had once been, sequestered away in an isolated corner of Morocco. Hiding her mouth behind her right hand, the Commander of Seiran Mountain closed her eyes and tried not to think of the personnel losses.

'Self destruct? It had do be, but was it the aliens or our people?'

By all accounts, the attack on Irhil M'Goun had stalemated with the alien invaders unable to breach the last line of inner base defenses. Andermatt had organized a counterattack and were about to enter the facility after mopping up the landed alien craft. Moments later the entire base went up in a pillar of nuclear fire. Losses were looking downright catastrophic, and not just in terms of human lives.

M'Goun had, until just recently, housed a not insubstantial stockpile of irreplaceable Elerium 115. It continued to supply critical manufacturing in support of the larger and more modern European bases at Andermatt and Griefswald. XCOM staff were the best of the best in all fields, scientific, military and occupational. Their engineers were some of the most talented men and women on the planet.

An entire base full of them had gone up in smoke.

It was Morlenbach all over again.

Then there was the clusterfuck in Iraq - despite harrying attacks and daredevil interception attempts across half of Africa and the Indian Ocean, the aliens had landed and begun attacking Coalition forces in the city. It was the toughest nut the aliens had ever sent forces to terrorize and they had answered the challenge by bringing their best (or worst) to bear, and in sizable numbers. The presence of Chryssalid pockets in the city was especially troubling.

Commander Yasuda had no idea how Information and Media Control were going to cover this terror site up. Intelligence indicated that American ground forces were continuing to try and engage the enemy directly, and that a number of Allied craft had been destroyed, including entire wings of aircraft and several ships in the Gulf that had launched missiles at nearby UFOs despite requests from UNETCO not to engage.

The Americans were going to be furious.

One would almost think it was a good thing to rile up the world superpower but things weren't entirely as they appeared. Terror Sites were twofold: to intimidate world leaders and to discredit XCOM. Nations didn't have to sign pacts with the aliens to hurt XCOM and the overall global defense network. A sufficiently enraged world power could try and go it alone, like they had all tried back in 1999.

It would end up now like it did then.

Even with the technology XCOM had uncovered and begun to disseminate, there was still no way to produce Elerium terrestrially. Laser armed ships wouldn't cut it against anything larger than a scout. Nations would still only have the ability to intercept UFOs over their own airspace - a serious problem when a UFO could cross a country in half an hour. It would only break apart UNETCO and the millennial accord. Even if the US mobilized all its resources, it would only encourage other states to make deals - with the enemy no less - to try and maintain parity.

XCOM knew from interrogations that the final phase of the enemy's plan didn't involve some sort of grand worldwide invasion. No: the aliens would pick and choose. Infiltrate and connive. All it would take, Intel believed, were a handful of rogue nations to play into the alien scheme.

The Visitors were no invasion.

They had always been here. They expected to always be here. They could not be effectively confronted in a conventional war... not yet. Not with their influence in human society, human governments, human genetics. Not with the UNETCO accords breaking and fraying apart. Noriko only hoped that the Americans could reign in their fury and swallow their losses tonight.

Hell, if the Italians stuck with the program even after that affair in Rome...

Commander Yasuda cupped her hands under her chin.

She didn't have a fraction of the psionic skill her two Captains had, but there was something tugging at her mind: a sense of unease. They had all their forces at Wyndham. Based on reports, the battle outside was going much better than the battle inside. Captain Banks expected the whole operation to finish mopping up in twenty minutes.

So what was this feeling she had, like things were about to go wrong?


	99. Auribus Teneo Lupum III

It was cold.

That was Ukyou's first thought as she came to: it was cold. Cold enough to make her _shiver_, even inside her insulated suit. Blinking the stars from her eyes but unable to properly rub them with her helmet still on, she grimaced as a shot of adrenalin and medical stimulants ran through her veins. Sucking in a long sharp gulp of air, she let it out with a ragged sigh followed by a wet cough.

"Shampoo?" Ukyou looked up and saw the other girl on her hands and knees, looking down. She, too, wore her personal armor so Ukyou's recognition was based on the small embellishments the Chinese Amazon had on her person: a bit of string clipped to the side, near where her ear would be, and a pink and red symbol she'd had etched onto the shoulder.

She saw Shampoo holding up a blue medikit, and nodded, understanding.

"You'll have to use speakers," Shampoo said, taking a moment to point at the side of her helmet that looked to have been scorched by a fire. "My antenna's scrambled."

"Ranma!" Ukyou suddenly gasped, turning to try and find him. He had been right in front of them! He must've taken most of the blast!

Shampoo scooted over and Ukyou saw him: he looked to be breathing beneath his armor, but it was damaged all along the front. She watched, helpless, as he arched his back and shook his head. Looking down, she confirmed they were still under a constant psionic barrage. If he had been knocked unconscious... yes, and he had been psionically targeted before, too!

"He was up before," Shampoo explained, carefully feeling her left side. "But the attacks got worse. We'll have to carry him."

Ukyou nodded in easy agreement.

"Rachael, what's our status? Are there any teams incoming?" the martial arts chef asked, trying to contact Command. "Rachael?"

"Getting anything?" Shampoo asked, leaning in a bit.

Static.

"No. I... I think I can hear something, but its...no," Ukyou winced at the white noise. "I don't know what's wrong."

"Ranma said he had to get the Mind Shield back up," Shampoo said, getting back on her feet. "So that's our mission now."

"What?" Ukyou asked, surprised by both her comrade's statement and her tone of voice. "No! We should get back to the surface! Make contact with Command and help Ranma!"

"Ranma was in command, and Ranma gave us our orders!" Shampoo snapped back, quick checking the status of her plasma rifle. "Look back there!"

The Chinese girl motioned to the dark stains on the walls and ceiling ahead of them. The man - if it had been a man - had been all but vaporized by the plasma grenade going off in such an enclosed space. Everything nearby had likely been scarred. The discolored patches on the walls weren't from blood - it was from cooling metal and fused silicate.

"We get the Mind Shield up, and they won't be able to do that unless they have line of sight, remember? Ranma will be back to normal. That's why he gave us the order."

Ukyou sucked on her lower lip, not liking the situation. It was dangerous... too dangerous. She could hardly imagine Ranma giving any of them that order. They should be backtracking either to the surface or to one of the areas secured by the other squads. They needed to get their communications fixed and check in with Command and their Coordinator. It was too reckless to run around without oversight in a psionic rich environment.

"Are you assuming command?" Ukyou asked, narrowing her eyes a bit behind her visor.

Shampoo responded quickly, "I am. You help Ranma get back on his feet."

Ukyou thought it over for a moment but eventually relented. _For now._

Getting on her knees, she suddenly felt overcome by a lightheaded nausea. It was almost as if something was wrong with her air supply... except that system checked out fine. A corner of her HUD also displayed her vitals. She wasn't badly hurt anywhere, except for a few fragments that had been stopped by her armor and a couple light burns. What was this feeling, then? Her heart rate spiked.

'Was it the drugs?' she glanced over at Shampoo. _'How much did she give me?'_

Ukyou felt a cold shiver run down her spine.

"Well?" Shampoo asked, rifle at the ready. "Let's go."

"Right, right," the Japanese girl protested while she thought. Once up and moving, her body began to quickly recover, drugs or not. Thankfully Ranma relaxed when she started to lift him by his shoulders. Holding him upright with one arm, Ukyou reached to the side and retrieved her battle spatula from where it lay against the wall. It was looking pretty beat up from those plasma blasts earlier. Only its heavy alien alloy construction kept it intact.

For a normal girl of her size, supporting Ranma's weight, armor and all, would have been uncomfortably difficult. Ukyou may as well have been carrying around a three ounce doll. Even with his armor and equipment he was far lighter than a martial artist of her caliber could lug around, for hours if need be. _That_ wasn't a problem.

It was Shampoo.

She was charging ahead, reading the map on her HUD to find the quickest route down to the next level where the Mind Shield facility had been located. Ukyou could understand her haste... no one liked inching through an area, watching every wall and checking every little detail. But with Ranma out of action and her at less than fifty percent - only her left arm being free - it was too much. Shampoo was being too reckless.

_'She's going to get us all killed.'_

* * *

Ukyou was going to get them all killed, Shampoo just knew it.

She was lagging behind, purposefully going slow. Ranma was big, but it wasn't like either of the girls couldn't support his entire body in the palm of their hand for hours at a time. He wasn't even moving much anymore. There was no excuse for Ukyou being so slow and so sloppily exposed as they advanced.

_'The enemy could be anywhere.'_

Shampoo fingered the trigger on her plasma carbine, sweeping the next room quickly for any sign of movement. Sepia colored eyes quickly checked the static map they'd been given of Wyndham. They were coming up to the next access incline.

"Shampoo," Ukyou spoke up, breaking the other girl's concentration.

"What?" she hissed over speaker, annoyed that her comms were out.

_'She's too loud. Why is she speaking so loudly?'_

"Are you sure we shouldn't try and find Foxtrot? I think they're north of us. Or they were before we got knocked out."

"The doors that way are still sealed," Shampoo reminded her. "Do you want to waste time getting them back open? What if something comes up behind us?"

"I don't think we should be doing this at all."

_'She's a coward.'_

"Don't tell me you're afraid?"

"There's a difference between fear and prudence."

"Just stick behind me," Shampoo ordered. "We'll hit the enemy from behind while he's fighting the Wyndham squads. Its always best to be aggressive in this sort of situation."

Ukyou grumbled unhappily but Shampoo ignored her.

_'She's acting strange... could she be...?'_

* * *

_'There's something wrong with her.'_

Ukyou watched Shampoo's back as she advanced down the inclined hallway that connected the research and engineering wings with the communications and command complex. The other squaddie was jumpy, like the proverbial cat. There was definitely something wrong with her; Ukyou's instincts could tell.

_'She's being influenced by them.'_

Ukyou held her battle spatula close to her chest, taking some small comfort in its proximity and protective width. If Shampoo was being manipulated by the aliens, then she was either leading them into a trap, or... or maybe she would just snap and turn on them while they were at their most vulnerable. Ukyou had heard about it before. The aliens didn't just take over your mind, they could make you do things. They could drive fear and panic into you by manipulating your brain chemistry. They could make you see things and hear things, driving a normally calm and collected trooper berserk.

Did Ranma really give that order to reactivate the Mind Shield?

She hadn't heard it. _Only Shampoo had_.

Was her comm system scrambled?

Why were the medikit stims making her lightheaded?

_'Shampoo...'_

* * *

_'Ukyou...'_

Shampoo felt a cold chill of fear run up her spine.

_'What's happening to you?'_

* * *

Ranma warmed his hands with his breath. It wasn't just cold - it was an unnatural rigor that cut through _ki_ hardened senses and skin. There was no way it was real. Walking through the abandoned hallways, he could see and feel the walls shift and change with every step. The pipes and in-set lighting were melding into the ceiling and the floor and starting to become replaced by wood paneling.

A layer of frost gave the wood a slick sheen.

"A psionic trap," he said, recognizing it.

He analyzed it, knowing that knowledge was the essential factor in breaking free. Captain Banks had taught him this. He had trained for this. This wouldn't go like it would have months ago, back before XCOM. He knew what he was up against.

"That battle aura thing you have provides some defense, that's true, but if an enemy breaks through that then you're nearly defenseless. You have to learn to understand and defeat psionic attacks - to recognize their form, their function and their weaknesses."

The voice of Captain Banks was as clear now as it had been then.

"You've read about the kinds of telepathic attacks you'll encounter: direct attacks, trap attacks, and hybrid techniques. However, only experience and training will give you the tools necessary to defeat the enemy under these conditions. We will begin our exercises by progressive exposure to ever more elaborate entrapments. Remember that perception is skewed when undergoing psionic attack. What feels like a few minutes may in fact be hours or a few seconds."

The Captain had begun by trapping his student with a simple room... except the door outside was on the ceiling. It was easy enough to get through. Ranma had used his natural abilities to leap up, gain a handhold, and open the door. Passing through it, he ended up in an identical room, falling after climbing up and passing through.

This time, he was unable to jump to the top. Once again, he used physical force to claw his way to the door. Again he fell, and again the room adapted. Lined with alien alloy, there was no way to gain or even force a handhold. It was only then that the exercise truly became difficult.

It was only then that he began to really learn.

"Analyze the situation. Is this a direct attack, trap attack, or hybrid attack?" Ranma thought out loud, advancing carefully. The walls were all wooden now, and starting to take on a familiar look. It seemed to be a trap attack.

That was bad.

Direct attacks were the easiest to foil using brute force, which happened to be the specialty of basically everyone in the two squads (minus Konatsu). It was a simple mind duel. One force pushed, the other pushed back, until one or the other prevailed. The backlash against the loser could be crippling when the duel was serious: the brain would hemorrhage or the body would start to catch fire or the nervous system would go haywire. Things like that. It **sounded** bad, but it was the easiest technique of the three to detect and break out of.

Trap attacks were more insidious, but thankfully, less likely to be encountered. Most aliens preferred direct attacks, either telepathic or telekinetic. A trap attack was dangerous for two reasons: it could be set up and used on an enemy and then the trap maker could leave, freeing himself from any potential backlash. It wasn't as deadly as a straight up duel, unless you happened to be in a dangerous spot when you got tagged by it. A trap attack needed to be disarmed by disturbing or disrupting the _intent_ of the trap, which meant observation, anticipation and investigation were more important than brute force.

If this was a trap attack...

Ranma fought back a shiver as the biting cold blew past his face. It was like walking into a freezer (and he would know, having been trapped in one for hours before). Up ahead, the walls opened up, revealing a floor with tatami mats and a small shrine at one end, now empty. He recognized it instantly, despite the growing layer of rime on the walls.

"The Tendo Dojo," he observed.

At the far end of the dojo, a door opened.

"So, its like that, huh?" Ranma smirked and cracked his knuckles. "Who am I gonna fight? Saffron? Herb? India Squad?"

A large silhouette appeared first against the backlight, resolving into the stern visage of Genma Saotome. The thought of fighting his annoying old man only got Ranma's blood pumping even faster. If that was it, then this would be easy. A moment later, an unexpected form also stepped out of the light: that of his mother. Nodoka and Genma Saotome stepped to the side, seemingly content to watch.

Ranma lowered his guard somewhat as Soun Tendo emerged, also eventually moving to stand against the wall. Ryouga and Mousse and even Kuno followed. These, too, Ranma had expected to fight, but the other martial artists simply stood aside. They were dressed like before, like back in Nerima. They all were. Shampoo came out next, wearing one of her Chinese dresses from the cafe, and even Ukyou wore her favorite _okonomiyaki_ outfit.

"What is this?" he asked, annoyed by the lack of action thus far. "You guys gonna stare me to death or something?"

A small frame finally appeared within the door and Ranma's initial quip died on his lips.

Akane.

She stepped forward where the others had hung to the side. The youngest Tendo daughter wore the same white _gi_ she had when he'd first sparred with her, more than two years ago. But this was her eighteen year old self, the one he had... the one he had become closer to lately. She took a few halting steps forward, and the door behind her darkened slightly before becoming replaced by more of the Dojo's wooden walls.

"Ranma," she spoke, the first of the entire procession to mutter so much as a word. "Ranma..."

"Akane," he said her name softly, before catching himself. "What is this? You want me to fight Akane?" He scoffed loudly. "Are you just trying to waste my time? I could dance around her for hours!"

"Ranma...!" Akane wiped something away from her bottom lip.

His _sakkijutsu_ instantly spiked with a warning, even within the psionic illusion.

Taking a step back, unsure, he then watched as she reached up to the hem of her gi and began to slide it down. For just a moment, it looked like she was going to disrobe... but then a familiar piece of armor became clear, hidden under her white sparring clothes. That green and red and the distinct design - it could only be one thing. One _damned_ thing.

The battle dougi.

The Gods' damned battle dougi!

Tearing the last of her white gi aside, Akane stood before him, once again wearing that cursed battle armor from before. Back then, it had given her incredible martial arts prowess... due more to its enchanted nature than Akane herself. Of course, at first, he had wanted that power for himself, but then it became obvious the suit had a certain perverted preference for being worn by girls. The whole debacle it had caused between himself and Akane was something he'd rather have forgotten.

_"I'll never forgive you if you hit me!"_

What a thing to say in the middle of a duel while busily pounding his face in.

Beating it then, knowing its weak spot, had been difficult without actually causing any physical harm to Akane herself. Of course... this wasn't the real Akane. He didn't need to hold back or restrain himself. He could beat her quite literally, by simply pounding her into the ground.

Couldn't he?

"Ranma!" Akane muttered again, stalking towards him. "Fight me, Ranma. Fight me."

Something... felt wrong, and it wasn't just his opponent or this place.

Predictably, Akane came right at him at full speed, augmented by the dougi. It was just like he remembered. Even back then, he'd gotten better at reading the armor and Akane's combined moveset, and now he was a good deal faster and stronger than before. Lightning fast blows whizzed by his head as he twisted and dodged; his arms only snapping up to block when Akane fell to her hands and attacked with her feet.

The blows damn near broke his arms.

Feet skidding along the floorboards, tearing up two tatami mats, he ducked under another flurry of spinning kicks before rolling out of the way. The dougi had used Akane's strength to the utmost before, but this was ridiculous! She'd never hit this hard before, not when he was trying to block her! Except...

_"Ranma...!" Akane wiped something away from her bottom lip._

Just great - the Super Soba, too?!

Putting the theory to the test, he caught one of her fists in his hand, directing the impact into the ground through his body. It was one of the perks of the art, being able to redirect physical forces. Cologne and Happosai were better still at it. The old freak had been able to stop a house leveling blow with just one finger, and Cologne was able to use it to make herself nearly invulnerable to single physical blows. Ranma's body shook from the forces bearing down on and through it, and the ground at his feet shook and buckled.

"Damnit. If it were just the super strength, or just the dougi..." He eyed the midriff of Akane's armor, knowing the weak spot there. "But both of them at the same time? Can I really stop her without hurting her?"

_Does it even matter?_

Dancing in and out of her reach, taking two near miss blows to the torso and face, he considered it. There was really no reason to hold back. It had pissed him off back then, not being able to just HIT BACK. There was no reason not to now. This was just part of some alien's mind game. It wasn't real. He could cut loose.

_Hit back._

Except... he didn't want to hit her.

Or did he?

_Hit her._

He did sort of... but...

Jumping back, he concentrated, not on one of his techniques, but on the appearance of the psionic construct all around him. After several iterations of Captain Bank's trap room, it had become impossible to get to the door without outright manipulation of the environment. Focusing past Akane, to her feet, he willed the wood to melt and give way.

Akane tensed to jump after him but her feet sunk into the now viscous floor.

"Strength is useless when you have nothing to move against. The more you try, the more you'll sink," Ranma explained, quickly glancing at the other fake family and friends in the dojo. He needed to find out how to break the intention of the trap. That was the only way out.

"Ranma!" Akane snarled, and frost began to collect around her legs. "Fight me for real!"

"You know you don't really want that," he replied, glaring at her. "You never wanted me to fight you for real. You just wanted to beat me to feel good about yourself."

That's right: _fight back._

_Say what you've always wanted to._

"Are you saying we're different in that respect, Ranma?" Akane hissed, pulling her feet free from the now frozen and solidified ground. "Doesn't beating others... Ryouga, Mousse, Kuno, me... doesn't it make you feel like a man? Doesn't it make you feel good, too?"

He tensed at the accusation, but...

_Its true._

"Why should anyone care how you win, as long as you do," Akane continued, advancing on him again. "That's what our school of martial arts is all about!"

Her blows came in fast, short cutting strikes and snapping legs. A foot tore into the side of his face just below the eye, blinding him momentarily and throwing him off balance. He managed to block - painfully - a tiger strike to the neck, but then another kick smashed into the back of his head, sending the pigtailed fighter to the floor. He hit, bounced, and narrowly escaped a descending heel that would have crushed his skull.

'She... she's...!'

Trying to get some more distance, trying to concentrate, trying to dodge, Ranma barely felt it when Akane managed to get a hand on his pigtail. Gasping, he crashed to the floor as she pulled at it, flipping him into the ground and then spinning him in a tight circle before introducing him to the wall. His nose actually broke - a feeling he hadn't had in some time - splattering hot blood over most of his face. Finally, his pigtail tore off entirely and he rolled against the wall, fielding another dozen spinning crescent kicks in a desperate bid for space and time.

'She isn't just beating me... she'll kill me...!'

_Fight back. For real._

Its just one blow. _She isn't real._ This isn't really Akane. _Fight back._ I have to. _Hit her. _That isn't Mister Tendo watching us. _Hit her._ I don't want to lose, and I damn sure don't want to die! _You have to. _This is a duel, right?

_Hit her._

Akane's right fist streaked by, missing his face by millimeters and slamming into the wall with a thunderous crash. Seizing the opportunity, Ranma's left palm curled into a fist, and in a flash of speed, buried itself in Akane's stomach, hitting the taijitu symbol that covered her midsection. The young woman's eyes widened from the blow, delivered with surprising force, and she flew back off her feet, shredded bits of the dougi shedding away like flakes of snow and ice.

"I had to," Ranma all but snarled. "You made me..."

Akane landed on her feet, eyes dark with rage.

"Ranma!" She hissed, and bit by bit, the dougi began to reform around her. "That won't work this time!"

Her fingers spasmed and twisted energy began to form something in her right hand. Ranma gaped, shocked that his finally working up the resolve to fight back for real hadn't done any good. He could only watch as a longbow formed in Akane's hands, so like those she had used from time to time - usually when she suspected he was up to no good.

Still... what could she do with just a bow? It was useless.

An arrow appeared in her other hand, and without a moments hesitation, the armored girl took aim at him and let fly. A thunderclap shook the dojo walls when she fired. Only a moment's abrupt caution kept Ranma out of its way. The formerly pigtailed martial artist landed a few feet away, staring in shock at the tear in the floor where the arrow had hit. The same floor that his and Akane's super powered blows had barely dented. The arrow had literally ripped the floor apart, revealing crackling psionic energy that took a few moments to bleed in and retexture itself as part of the dojo.

'This isn't real. It doesn't have to make sense. But there's no doubt that if I get hit...' Ranma's thoughts turned dark. 'I'll die.'

Another _shiver_ of razor sharp cold air made him wince.

This was bad.

* * *

Joshua Ben-Solomon, Captain, was currently in several places at once - or rather, his mind was. Most of him was still safe and sound inside his body, itself protected by escorts and powered armor and well away from the areas of heavy fighting. He needed most of his mental processes there, not only as a failsafe, but to coordinate blaster bomb attacks in and around the field of engagement.

However, while most of him was "at home" so to speak, three other parts of him were engaged elsewhere. Two were currently occupying Muton hosts within the landed alien battleship. It would do a soldier well not to underestimate the physical fortitude, skill, and relentless drive of the Muton race - literally their only weakness was psionics, and it was put there on purpose. They were pawns of the Ethereals as much as they were thinking, reasoning, sentient beings. The psionic knife, unfortunately for them, cut both ways and the humans had usurped the powers of their masters.

With a roar, the two subjugated Mutons charged an entrenched nest of their fellows, turning on their comrades. The aliens were quick to respond - quicker than humans tended to be, in fact. It had been mere moments since he seized control over the Muton's minds, carefully assuming control over both of them at the exact same time. India squad had identified between three and four aliens entrenched in one of the battleship's quadrants, near the lift to the western engine pylon. They had passed on the visual data and the location to him, and he had quickly launched a multi-pronged psionic attack.

The aliens counterattacked instantly, having sensed their comrade's disconnect with The Mind. The Muton soldier was hit the instant he turned, heavy plasma rounds lifting him off his feet and blowing the top half of his armored body into a black ashen cloud. The second Muton, a medic, took a blow to the torso that would have punched halfway through a bank vault door. The creature's organic armor, effective against plasma, dampened and redistributed the sudden blast of radiation and concussive force, even from a center of mass shot. It was crippled, but alive.

Diving to the side, escaping another plasma bolt, Ben-Solomon ordered the creature to fire its stun bomb launcher. It was a weapon often found carried by medics in the field, and the aliens used it just like XCOM did (although these days, they used weapon attachments to prep and fire the stun bombs rather than a dedicated launcher): the bombs were extremely effective in blanketing area for tactical denial, for crowd control, and for stunning psionically compromised allies. Some XCOM analysts had even suggested remote detonated stun bomb compartments be added to personal and powered armor, so Command could put to sleep any agent thought to be compromised in the field. The idea had some merit, Ben-Solomon could admit, but it was still quite unpopular and for good reason.

His puppet Muton managed to get off the shot, firing wildly for the ceiling.

A small dark purple pellet hit the unyielding exotic alloy, disintegrating on impact and releasing a complex cocktail of gasses into the atmosphere. These would react with the air and become inert after less than a minute, leaving very little residue behind, but before they did they adhered to the bodies of all organics nearby, seeping in through even the armored skin of the remaining Muton and the withered corpse-like epidermis of his Ethereal handler. Immediately, a powerful paralytic poison set in, freezing mind and body. The breaking of the pellet also sent out a burst of short ranged psionic static, inhibiting higher mental processes even before the toxins worked to finish the job.

Ben-Solomon felt his connection to the Muton waver and then instantly cut off. He retreated the disconnected parts of himself, the fractions that had been in the two aliens, and focused more on the _third_ fragment. This one, he had detached and placed inside one of his subordinates, the lieutenant of India Squad, who had helped coordinate the psionic attack in the first place. Mental probes, manipulation and subjugation was far easier when you had line of sight rather than just a basic location.

Telepresence wasn't easy, after all, especially under combat conditions.

Having a shard of his mind within someone nearby, someone who could by-proxy see the enemy, was an immense help. It was one of XCOM's favorite psionic tricks. A skilled master could "chain" his psionic activities - by first controlling one alien, using it to spot another, and taking control of that one, too. The second alien would reveal more aliens in hiding or deeper in enemy controlled territory. By the time one was gunned down, the attacker would be leapfrogging back into the enemy ranks, sometimes all the way to the alien command staff, which could then be taken out via blaster bombs or a suicidal mind controlled minion.

It was taxing, but very rewarding when it could be pulled off. Only recently had the aliens started to adapt to the tactic, spreading out their units into smaller cells when in the field and being much more cautious of psionic attack. XCOM was also well aware that the enemy could try the same technique against them, and likewise used control and squad dispersal to minimize the effects of a psionic "chain attack" effect.

Via the piece of him in Ryouga's mind, the Captain watched as India Squad rapidly advanced into the slowly dispersing cloud and closed with the stunned aliens. Only the Ethereal was still semi-active, despite the point blank stun bomb. One of India Squad's martial artists juked sharply to the side, avoiding a shot by the dazed alien before finishing it off with an archaic sword strike that neatly opened the body from mid torso to cranium. There was no surviving an attack like that, even with the Ethereals' notorious biological telekinesis. The two stunned Mutons were finished with plasma fire to the head - the only guaranteed way to do the job.

A moment later, the swordsman staggered.

"Kunou?" Ryouga barked, feeling the disturbance with his passive battle aura.

"Came and went," the kendoist replied, shaking his head. "Cold..."

Ryu hissed as it washed over him.

"Its probing us!" Ryouga realized, and directed his thoughts to both the squad and the Captain. "Captain! Mousse is...!"

_"I know!"_

Mousse had the lowest psionic strength of anyone in the squad.

A heartbeat later and the entire battleship shook as a blaster bomb went off in the third tier above them. Captain Banks was also supporting the attack, and he had finally managed to get enough control over one of the Ethereals there - probably the navigator - to get it to fire off its blaster launcher within or near the control room. The superstructure of the battleship was tough, and it served to funnel the explosion along halls and through open doors. The alien leadership had just been gutted in their nest.

But... then why was Mousse clutching his head in pain?

"Damnit!" Ryouga roared, powerless to help. "Ryu, Kuno! Restrain Mousse!"

Both martial artists reacted instantly to the order, pinning their comrade in arms to the wall and holding his arms and legs in place. The Chinese Amazon's head slumped limply, his form unresisting. Unseen to the normal eye, his aura was in turmoil, shifting and pulsing and wounded. Ryouga saw it - felt it - and understood what it meant.

"Sir," Ryu asked, a bit tentatively. "What if...?"

Ryouga scowled behind his helmet. "You know 'what if.'"

* * *

**There was** _No time_

Mousse saw the world, frozen in time and space.

**Have to** _Take it_

He saw Ryouga and Kuno and Ryu standing around him in states of shock, the former turning towards where the master of hidden weapons was himself stuck in time. Ephemeral wisps of the stun bomb's gas still lingered in the air, but they didn't move, frozen like faint green clouds. Finding himself able to move his eyes, he could see the end of the corridor, the one that led back to the main left of the battleship, was a puddle of darkness.

**Must have** _Your Body_

An unexpected _shiver_ ran down Mousse's arms at the sudden thought that cut, like a serrated knife, into his brain. It sounded like his thoughts and felt like his intentions, but they were too sudden, too forceful, too _wrong_. Mousse felt the bonds on his body slacken; he could move his fingers first, then his neck, then his arms and legs. He quickly realized some of what was going on.

"Mental domination?" he thought/asked. "I won't allow it!"

_You have no choice_

Ice began to collect on his arms, now that they were able to move again. A sense of hurried panic filled Mousse's mind, augmenting the natural impulse: _escape_, get mobile, _escape_! He had to _get out of here_! _This was_ some kind of trap!

"Stop!" A voice boomed, and something coalesced in the air, drawing in the frozen clouds of stun gas to form a rough human outline. "Squaddie, do **not** move!"

Mousse paused. 'That voice was...'

_Trying to trick_

'Him! No, that wasn't'

_What he wanted_

'He knew that'

_He needed to get out_

'Of this'

_Back the way he came_

"Mousse," the voice said again, and he knew he should have remembered it, but it seemed so distant. So long ago. "Do not move. You **can not** move!"

_Begone_

The cloud instantly broke apart.

'I didn't just think that! That wasn't my thought!' It all came back in a rush. Kuno, stumbling from a psionic attack. Ryu cursing as it hit him, too. And then it...

_It..._

'It hit me!' Mousse mentally snarled. 'You're in me right now! Hiding!'

_Your body will house me_

'You're dead! You were just blown to pieces! Don't try and hide from that in me!' Mousse willed himself not to move. That other voice, it had been Captain Ben-Solomon.

_You will_

'Fuck you!' the male Amazon cursed. 'I won't let a coward use me like that!'

_I will have a body for I desire it_

'Just die!'

_I can never die; not even one of my kind have died this day for all your flailing attacks. It is inevitable. Surrender yourself to me and you will be given joy; refuse and know only suffering. You will submit to me now_

'You sound like you're in a rush there,' Mousse observed with a chuckle. 'See, right now, I think what gives me the most joy is screwing you over, you bastard!'

Mousse's limbs began to lock up again, but by bit, and the frost fall off. A looming sense of dread replaced it, driving him to try and run. He remembered the Captains words, steeled his mind, and willed himself to stay. Instead, he accepted the forces binding him, forcing him still, even in the face of an unnatural alien terror.

_You will die_

'You will.'

_I told you: I can not die_

Just then, the other frozen figures began to move. Ryouga turned his head, and his hand slowly started to point at the hidden weapons master. Kuno and Ryu also moved, heading towards him, reaching for him. Another spike of panic filled Mousse's mind. _What were they doing? Why were they headed towards him?_

_They will kill you_

'No!'

_They will kill you to harm me_

A _shiver_ filled Mouse's veins with sudden power.

_Escape - fight back and escape_

* * *

Shampoo stared down the barrel of the plasma rifle, her gaze meeting the ejection end of a plasma pistol held by her one time comrade, the treacherous _okonomiyaki_ chef. Ranma lay discarded on the floor, dropped the moment Shampoo turned to confront Ukyou on her suspicious behavior. The instant she saw Ranma out of the way, Shampoo drew her own weapon, knowing Ukyou was reaching for hers.

The two froze there, ready to fire.

Ukyou's face couldn't be seen past her polarized helmet visor, but Shampoo could all but imagine the manic expression the other girl must have: her eyes wild and bloodshot, her mind scrambled by alien psionics. _She had to die. It was the only way to save Ranma. It was the only way to save the mission! It was the only way to prove herself!_

Shampoo adjusted her aim to try and compensate for the cover provided by the other girl's battle spatula. It could deflect a shot from a plasma carbine, even at this range, and Ukyou had trained extensively to use it as her primary means of defense. That didn't mean she couldn't be beat at range, however.

_Yes_

Shampoo played it out in her mind: she would adjust her aim to hit Ukyou's exposed left arm. She was a better shot than the ambidextrous chef. She could do it. She could make the shot. The plasma bolt would either graze Ukyou, burning most of her arm, or blow it apart completely. Shampoo could then close and use her superior strength, barreling into the Japanese girl and throwing her off her feet.

In her mind, she imagined it. Ukyou was in midair from the body blow, trying to hold the flat of her spatula to her body as a shield. Her left arm was gone at the elbow, her plasma pistol flying slowly through the air. One, two, three shots at this range. Ukyou would probably be able to block the first one, or even two, but the third would get past and hit near the shoulder. The blast would surely kill her.

Shampoo tensed.

_You have to_

* * *

Ukyou adjusted her aim, knowing just what the insane Amazon had planned. she had known all along that Shampoo couldn't be trusted. The aliens had gotten to her. Did the Chinese bimbo really think she couldn't feel all that killing intent, literally radiating off from the other girl? Madness. She had to have completely lost her mind. The moment Shampoo had spun around, Ukyou had known what was going to happen. Tossing Ranma aside to keep him out of the field of fire, to save his life, she had brought up her spatula to defend her body.

And then Shampoo drew her weapon.

The Chinese girl's face couldn't be seen past her polarized helmet visor, but Ukyou could all but imagine the manic expression the other girl must have: her eyes wild and bloodshot, her mind scrambled by alien psionics. _She had to die. It was the only way to save Ranma. It was the only way to save the mission! It was the only way to survive!_

Shampoo would try and charge right in after taking a sniping shot at a vulnerable area. Ukyou was sure of it. But she was in for a surprise... the moment Shampoo moved, and the moment Ukyou saw her quick step, she would run right into the bladed end of Hera-sama. The spatula didn't look it, but it was razor sharp. Shampoo would be cleaved in half before she even knew she'd run headfirst into a trap.

Ukyou tensed.

_You must_

* * *

Akane hit the floor with a crash.

Ranma landed on top of her, fist drawn back to deliver a finishing blow. His left arm was a crippled and broken mess, and he'd had to fight the last two minutes without it. It was only then, as desperation set it, that he started to use more of his techniques and will more of the room to directly attack his opponent. His face was a bloody mess, one eye swollen near shut and one ear hanging by a thread of skin and connective tissue.

It wasn't real, he knew that, but it still hurt like hell.

Pausing, just a moment, Akane's head came up and butted him in the face, forcing a new spray of blood into the back of his mouth as his front teeth shattered. His body reacted to the attack instinctively, his right arm curling up and delivering an elbow to the girl's face. Akane spat blood, a spray of crimson spurting against the matted tatami mats and paneled wood of the dojo floor.

_Kill her_

The fight had been hard.

_Kill her_

The aliens had powered up his opponent in every way imaginable: they had used someone he cared about, someone he thought he even loved. They had used her at her most ugly, dredging up his worst and bitterest memories, giving her the power and intention to kill him. Saffron, Herb, Ryouga, Ryu... any of those guys, Ranma wouldn't have hesitated to pound into the ground, but Akane? This Akane?

Damn them.

But it wouldn't stop him. He was Ranma Saotome! He would NOT LOSE!

_Kill her_

"Akane!" He roared, reeling back to finish the fight once and for all.

_KILL HER_

* * *

Mousse was still as death.

Holding the right side of the Chinese weapons master pinned to the wall, Ryu exchanged a worried look with Kuno, standing to the young man's left. Mousse had struggled briefly, but intensely, and then gone completely slack. It didn't even feel like he was breathing.

"Lieutenant..." Ryu began to say.

"I know," Ryouga cut him off.

"His heart rate," Nabiki said it instead. "Its slowing. He's barely breathing, if we don't do something... he'll die."

* * *

_You will die_

Mousse was silent.

_Creature_

_Human_

_You will die_

Nothing.

_What do you gain by this? Are you trying to kill yourself?_

With a snap, a new form took shape out of ethereal air. White sinew wrapped and knitted together, slowly dyeing itself a titian orange. Shape and substance and color spread, weaving together into an empty robe that rippled with psionic power. There was no body within, only a frigid presence and an unearthly _shiver_ that numbed the senses.

_"If you refuse to cooperate, little creature, then I shall take what I desire by force,"_ Shiver stated, disembodied voice devoid of emotion. As it came closer, bit by bit, a shape started to fill in the empty space within the robes: pale skin, long dark hair, and blue eyes.

"I shall take your form, your body, and with that new anchor I shall spread myself among your comrades," it declared, now with Mousse's own voice. "But you...! I will have you suffer for this resistance. For this agonizing delay."

With the speed of a snake, an arm - the real Mousse's - struck, fingers wrapping around the Ethereal's throat. Letting out a long weary breath, finally breaking the meditative state he had placed himself in, the Chinese Amazon's aura spiked before pulling back under his robes. Thick glasses glinted with malice.

"What can you do?" The Ethereal asked, cocking its head. "Choke that which needs not breathe? You are helpless."

Mousse said nothing.

Instead, the robes along his right arm tore to shreds as a dozen blades shot out, impaling the Ethereal's human body and ripping into its robes. It lurched, pierced so quickly and so terribly, that there was no time or chance to move in any coordinated fashion. Impossibly, Mousse's hidden blades extended from the shredded remains of his robes, digging even deeper into his victim.

The Ethereal sneered in defiance.

And then the razor sharp ends of the blades, some buried deep in the alien's torso, others doing straight through it, violently split. In an instant, the alien's actualized form tore apart. There was no blood. Instead, a hissing black gas burned away the ruined body.

The torn remains of titian robes fluttered in the air.

_Damn you... you...!_

* * *

Nodoka Saotome shook from where she stood, reeling slightly as if struck.

It was the only movement any of the assembled characters in the false dojo had made since Ranma and Akane began their fight. It was only an instant, a mere moment's weakness. In the heat of the moment, it was easy to overlook or miss entirely.

It was what Ranma had been waiting and watching for.

Seamlessly, the trajectory of his fist shifted, and he concentrated his battle aura and what was left of his confidence into his arm. His instinct, his gut, every honed sense he had was screaming that **this was it**. This was what he had been looking for. This was the center of the intent that held together the psionic trap. It was a hybrid trap after all - a presence was in it, adapting and keeping it together so it wouldn't fall apart when confronted.

An instant's weakness was all it took.

A red and yellow _ki_ blast nailed Nodoka to the wall behind her, the force of it shredding away her kimono. His mother. Of course. He had fought with everyone here before, even Akane and Mister Tendo, but never his mother. She was the **plant**. The one he would naturally never suspect. Everyone else had been pulled from his memory as a candidate to fight, as someone who would instigate him, as someone it would shame him to lose to, except one.

As Nodoka fell to her knees, black smoke rose from her nearly nude form. Flesh peeled away and bits of orange peeked through the disguise. Under him, the Akane he had been fighting shook, like a puppet whose strings had become entangled, and went limp. He ignored it, standing up and directing another murderous _ki_ blast at the creature that had worn his mother's body.

_No_

_Kill_

"The only one whose gonna die here," Ranma thought-projected, unleashing another blast that flattened the Ethereal against the wall. "Is you!"

* * *

Shampoo and Ukyou's fingers twitched.

They felt it, too.

Shampoo glanced down at the rifle, and at where it was aimed. Behind her helmet, her eyes shot up at where Ukyou stood. She hadn't moved, but Shampoo could feel a sudden hesitation and confusion.

_KILL HER_

The impulse bore down on her mind with all for force and subtlety of a freight train.

_KILL HER OR SHE WILL KILL YOU_

Shampoo didn't believe it. Not anymore. The cold was still there, like a freezing storm, but unlike before it couldn't seep in through the comforting aura of warmth she had erected against it. Unfortunately, it was impossible to tell if Ukyou had done the same thing.

She could still be compromised.

"Hey," Shampoo said, speaking just above a whisper. "Stupid spatula girl."

"What is it?" Ukyou replied, but added, "You Chinese hussy."

"No-skills pancake chef."

"Can you repeat that in Japanese, sugar?"

"Can you ask me that in Chinese?"

Both girls lowered their weapons.

_KILL HER_

"I almost killed you, you know," Ukyou said, her stance relaxed. It was over.

_KILL HER_

"More like I almost killed you," Shampoo corrected her teammate. Together, they turned to where Ranma still lay, his battle aura out and blazing despite his being nearly unconscious on the floor. Both of them knew what that meant.

The cold ebbed away, retreating into the darkness.

And their comms came back on.

"...Kuonji, anybody, please respond!"

Ukyou answered first, keying her supposedly deactivated TeamComm back on. In fact, it had been on the entire time. It was her senses, her hearing, that had been manipulated. The white noise from before...

"This is Squaddie Kuonji. We were under psionic attack but have resumed control of the situation."

"About time!" Rachael, their controller back at Seiran, gave a harried sigh of relief. "Lieutenant Saotome is still under a psionic compulsion. He isn't responding to any of my pings or shocks. I can't break him out of it myself."

"This is Shampoo," the other member of Juliet spoke up. "We'll take care of it."

Ukyou nodded. "What do you have in mind? I don't think pinching him will help."

Shampoo chuckled confidently. "I wouldn't expect a mere pancake maker to understand."

"And I wouldn't expect a girl who never graduated from high school to explain it, either, but please," Ukyou said, false modesty and sincerity mixed with humor. "Try and enlighten me."

"I can feel it hiding in his battle aura," Shampoo readily explained, walking purposefully over to Ranma's limp form. "And I want some payback."

Ukyou rested her battle spatula, blade first, against the floor.

"You're not the only one, sugar."

* * *

_SMALL CREATURE_

Nodoka was gone. _Shiver_ was all that remained.

The Ethereal was psionic fury incarnate. Ranma had encountered the aliens before on pervious missions. He had heard that there was a difference between normal Ethereals - alien overseers, researchers and bureaucrats - and true _combat-class_ Ethereals. He was seeing it now, firsthand. It wasn't so much a difference in power as it was experience and application.

The dojo walls rippled, and a wave of psionic force tore the skin from Ranma's body, flaying him alive. The pain, very real even in this fake place, nearly sent even a man with his constitution and threshold for agony into mental shock. Instead, he focused, and his battle aura collapsed into him, regenerating the damage as fast as it could be delivered.

"You finally wanna fight?" Ranma asked, grinning madly. "That's fine by me! Bring it on! Come on!"

The Ethereal was a storm of titan energy, formless and horrible in its intensity.

_I SHALL REND THE SMALLEST SCRAPS OF FLESH FROM YOUR BONES_

A duo of mental lances bore down on Ranma, meaning to pin him to the floor like an insect, but impossibly the human managed to catch the nearly invisible bolts of mental energy. His left arm back in working order, Ranma's hands clenched at the blazing tips of the psionic spears. He knew this technique - it was one of the telekinetic attacks Ethereals used in the _real world_.

It obviously didn't get it.

_IMPOSSIBLE_

_ YOU CAN NOT MATCH ME_

"This is my mind, you know. My world," Ranma reminded it. "I ain't gonna let things go the way you want 'em to, not anymore!"

_INSIGNIFIGANT CREATURE_

Ranma felt it recede, pulling away from the fight, trying to escape.

"Oh no you don't!" The martial artist slammed his palms down on the floor, and **willed**. He thought of the most impenetrable space he could think of. The walls shifted and contorted in response to his desires: tatami mats jumped up into the air, reforming before falling in place. Walls turned from plain wood to taking on a more metallic sheen.

It became the indestructible Tendo Dojo back at Seiran.

The Ethereal's mental storm wavered.

_WHAT IS THIS_

"You ain't going nowhere!" Ranma announced, smirking viciously. "Right guys?"

Then, from a corner of the room, another presence made itself known.

"Just what I wanted to hear," Mousse said, walking forward and cracking his knuckles. "Nice choice of location, Saotome."

"Is very appropriate," Shampoo said, also entering the fray from the ether. "What? Why Shampoo speak in this stupid language again?!"

Ukyou also appeared, laughing at her companion's discomfort. "I'd say its your true self made manifest, Shampoo..."

"Sorry," Ranma apologized but only half heartedly. "My head is still working in Japanese I guess. Glad you could make it, though."

"You felt our ki?" Mousse asked, impressed despite himself. "And constructed a semi permeable mental barrier? You're annoyingly quick witted as usual, Lieutenant."

Ranma gave his Chinese some-time-rival a smirk.

And then turned his attention back to Juliet Squad. "Things ok outside?"

Shampoo shrugged.

"Just fine," Ukyou replied, glancing at the now trapped Ethereal in Ranma's mindscape. "No thanks to this jackass. He must've thought it'd be funny to have me beat up on Shampoo."

"Or that it funny Shampoo finally put stupid spatula girl out of her misery."

"It tried to kill you, Shampoo?" Mousse's voice was surprisingly calm. "I see. Let's kill it slowly."

The Ethereal pulsed, once again trying to escape.

_FILTHY LITTLE HUMANS _

_YOU CAN NOT CONTAIN ME AGAINST MY WILL_

The four began to close in on it.

_ I WILL NOT BE_

_ I CAN NOT BE_

_ KILLED_

_I..._

_I.._

_ I._

* * *

Ranma opened his eyes.

The psionic warning indicator was silent as the grave, and despite the residual pain in his body - a carryover from the pain caused in the mental trap - he felt extraordinarily good. Shampoo and Ukyou were standing over him, also just now fully coming back to their senses. Ranma had felt them leave, and Mousse as well, retreating back the way they had came.

He smirked.

The Ethereal wasn't just gone.

"You lose," he whispered.

* * *

Through millions of miles of space, it was felt.

For the first time in memory, an Ethereal had died.

Actually _died_. The loss of a _body_ was inconsequential; it was not true death. This was different. For some reason, Shiver had not been able to return to the Mind. Even those Ethereals killed in psionic duels with empowered humans were still within the Mind, and could return in new bodies and recover. This time something was wrong. Something had _happened_ to the Commander of the Third Assault Wave.

He was _dead_.

Beyond the ability of the Mind to revive.

The news was troubling, even upsetting, but not taken to be anything but an anomaly. Shiver had extended himself too much and been unable to return. The Mind soothed the concerns of the minority who worried it was, perhaps, some new sort of human weapon. Of all the sentients connected to the Mind, of all the beings Called to Mars, only one laughed.

Alone in a room within the alien scout ship, deep in the depths of space...

Cologne laughed.

Her cute little students had actually _killed_ an Ethereal Commander. True death.

Everything was going _perfectly_.


	100. Chap100 Reflections Lost on a Dark Road

Wow. I'm just now noticing this is CHAPTER 100 (!) of FFN's version of The Road to Cydonia.  
Its too bad... I should have something more zany or crazy special. Then again, this is _Big Fucking News _(also known as BFN) so it'll have to do.

* * *

.

**Author Notes (IMPORTANT re: TRTC updates)  
**

Well, it has been a while since I updated TRTC, and for good reason. Those who have been reading the notices on my author page or elsewhere may already know that I've been busily working on a massive "The Road to Cydonia" related side project over the last year. Everything else was put on hold.

That **side project** is now, finally, ready for release.

Called "Reflections Lost on a Dark Road" it is an in-continuity crossover with a friend of mine, Lathis, the author of "Teen Titans and the Lost Boy" and "Dark Titans." Again: it is part of the continuity of both our fanfic verses, taking place roughly two months from where TRTC and DT left off. For "The Road to Cydonia" that means it is roughly two arcs in the future from Ch33: Auribus Teneo Lupum. When we finish releasing Reflections, we will resume with the previous and succeeding arcs in both TRTC and DT (in my case, I except that will be "Cydonia or Bust!" after the crossover ends). At that time, I will delete this update chapter (probably) and resume normal TRTC chapter updates again.

In the meantime, here is the address for **"Reflections Lost on a Dark Road" **- you can consider updates in that fic to be basically updates to this one.

_Simply cut and paste the bit below after fanfiction dot net._

**/u/2754251/**

- Cap'n Chryssalid

(alternatively, you can go to my FFN site and I'll have a hyperlink there, for those who don't want to cut/paste the link)

.

* * *

_In the meantime, here's some more XCOM fluff regarding TRTC_  
_(actually, it's been up on my trtc ufopedia for a while, but I know most people don't use that archive)_

* * *

**WEAPONS TECH PROFILES**

**GAU-12 25mm Equalizer**

The GAU-12 25mm six-barrel gun was the "cannon" armament used during some attempted UFO interceptions (due to the interceptors being an American design). The cannon was mounted internally, but had limited ammunition, range and accuracy. Only four interceptions were attempted using the GAU-12; of those, one resulted in the loss of the interceptor, two resulted in a failed interception, and one was a limited success. It was soon determined that interception using cannon was almost impossible due to the durability, speed, and maneuverability of alien UFOs. The one success was a small scout. Against any larger UFO (and they're all larger than a small scout), engaging with cannon was considered too dangerous and ineffective.

The GAU-12 has a 300 round capacity with a lead computing optical sight system (LCOSS) gunsight. The Marines use a 25mm depleted uranium [DU] round in the GAU-12 Gatling gun on AV-8 Harriers.

GAU-12 Interceptors have, on rare occasions, been used in a ground attack role against alien forces. Due to this possibility, some UNETCO bases still stock one or two cannons, just in case.

**CAAM-5 CAMRAAM "Stingray"**

Engine...TDR and high-performance directed rocket motor  
Mass...225 kg  
Length...4.11 m  
Diameter...0.191 m  
Speed...Mach 6.8  
Range...30 km  
Warhead...high explosive blast/fragmentation

The Stingray is an active radar guided conventional advanced medium air to air missile (CAMRAAM) developed by the UNETCO International Armaments Consortium. Major contributors to this project include corporations from both NATO countries and Russia; the missiles themselves are assembled and armed in several sites and shipped as necessary to X-COM facilities world wide. The Stingray is a cutting edge Beyond Visual Range (BVR) air-to-air missile (AAM) capable of all weather day and night performance. It is often colloquially referred to as the "Spanker" (no relation to the MR-UR-100 Sotka) missile by some pilots, due to its attack pattern of hitting the underside of a UFO as it banks upward, "spanking it on the ass." When a Stingray is launched, X-COM pilots use the brevity code Fox-Three in radio communication, as with all active-guidance missiles.

In function, the Stingray is similar to the MBDA Meteor, in that it utilizes a Throttleable Ducted Rocket (TDR) (a ramjet) with an integrated nozzleless booster. As in the Meteor, the TDR propulsion system provides a long range, high average speed, and wide operational envelope from sea level to high altitude. The Stingray also utilized the most advanced three dimensional thrust vectoring and target acquisition technologies. This limits its range, compared to many other conventional missiles, but gives the weapon improved maneuverability - a necessity in hitting UFOs - and a powerful warhead. A powerful two-way datalink allows the missile to receive targeting information and updates from multiple sources, decreasing the chance of losing target lock.

The Stingray can be refitted to use a small nuclear warhead, but to date this variant has never been used in combat.

The Stingray remains UNETCO's conventional (in terms of warhead) interception option. Due to the fact that it does not have a nuclear warhead, it was the weapon of choice for the interdiction of smaller UFOs early in the war up to the development of laser and plasma beam technology. It would prove dangerous to use against larger alien craft, however, and by 2002 it was phased out almost entirely in favor of air-to-air plasma beam weapons.

**CAAM-6 UMRAAM "Avalanche"**

Engine...TDR and high-performance directed rocket motor  
Mass...382 kg  
Length...4.21 m  
Diameter...0.195 m  
Speed...Mach 6.8  
Range...60 km  
Warhead...nuclear warhead (variable yield)

The Avalanche is an active radar guided unconventional medium air to air missile (UMRAAM) developed by the UNETCO International Armaments Consortium. Like with the Stingray, the missile is assembled off-site before transport to a central facility where it is then inspected and mated to a nuclear warhead. Prior to its destruction during an alien raid, this was the Morlenbach facility in Germany. Since that event, inspections are now carried out in a secret facility in Western Europe (known among troops as the "Uranium Hotel"). The missiles then undergo another round of safety checks and inspections before being requisitioned to X-COM bases. Meticulous records are kept of every warhead entered into UNETCO service, what missiles they are mated to, where they are shipped, and where and when they are used.

Structurally, the Avalanche is similar to the Stingray. It uses a Throttleable Ducted Rocket (TDR) (a ramjet) with an integrated nozzleless booster to achieve a high speed on approach to the target. It is larger and far less maneuverable than the Stingray, however, doing damage to the target by virtue of the proximity triggered detonation of its nuclear warhead. It possesses a similar electronics package to the Stingray. One notable difference is that the Avalanche's warhead needs to be activated before it is mounted to a hard point, and then electronically unlocked before firing (after mounting). The levels of redundancy involved have ensured that, after many years using these weapons, there has never been an accident.

The warhead used is similar to the American W80. It is a small thermonuclear warhead (or hydrogen bomb) with a variable explosive yield between 5 and 150 kT TNT. The proximity fuse can also be adjusted to trigger detonation at different distances from the target. The Avalanche is capable of intercepting and damaging even the largest UFOs, however, because only a few of these missiles can be carried at a time (due to size), they may not be able to successfully down the more powerful alien craft: Terror Ships, Battleships, and occasionally Supply Ships can survive several salvos of these weapons. However, it is a powerful addition to the X-COM arsenal, and it was essential in the early years before the development of ship mounted plasma beams and fusion ball launchers.  
Most Avalanche missiles were retired in 2003.

When an Avalanche is launched, X-COM pilots use the brevity code "Genie" in radio communication, to announce the launch of a guided air-to-air nuclear missile.

**CL-3 "Hecate" Laser Cannon**

The CL-3 Hecate was developed by UNETCO as a scaled up version of the laser weapons designed for ground troops and armored vehicles. While a laser suffers increasing beam diffraction at extreme range in an atmosphere, the advantages of relativistic target interception and high burst damage potential are undeniable. Due to effective differences in interception, compared to ground combat, the CL-3 is designed to dump laser energy into a target as a single large pulse rather than as a dwelling beam. This makes the CL-3 less energy efficient than its smaller cousins, but far more powerful.

Once within range of a target, an illumination laser is used to determine range, speed and bearing as well as provide lock on. Following deactivation of the weapon safety, the laser designator takes over for the radar system, and automatically adjusts the aim of the laser cannon and fires given a high hit percentage. This means that the human pilot can concentrate on navigation and evasive maneuvers, while the weapons automatically track and engage. A higher degree of accuracy is achieved using this system than is otherwise possible when reliant entirely on human reaction speeds.

The CL-3 Hecate is also notable as one of the most important weapons produced by X-COM for sale to its allies. While the UNETCO Charter forbids the use of "exotic or alien technologies" by one member nation against another Earth based non-alien power or agency, it can be expected that once the war is over and the Charter expires that a great many "next generation" fighter craft will be refitted to use laser weaponry. There are already post-war plans for the use of X-COM laser technology in ballistic missile defense systems.

When a CL-3 Hecate's automatic targeting is activated, X-COM pilots use the brevity code "Beam Active" in radio communication, to announce the activation of beam-based automatic targeting and engagement.

**CP-3 Medium Plasma Cannon (MPC) "Fenrisulven"**

The CP family of craft mounted beam weapons are derived from alien plasma technology. Originally retrofitted alien weapons and direct copies, starting with the CP-2 UNETCO began to manufacture plasma cannons with a combination of range and power that most suited human combat operations. The CP-3 is the most modern large scale plasma weapon in the X-COM arsenal, offering extreme long range interception, virtually instantaneous transmission time to target, high reliability and impressive power. The only major drawback is its use of Elerium-115 (which can not be manufactured at present; it can only be salvaged from alien craft or installations). For this reason, most regional Commanders only authorize the use of plasma cannons on high priority targets (Abductors, Terror Ships, Battleships, Supply Ships).

The CP-3 operates through the use of Elerium-115 annihilation. This exotic isotope, under certain conditions, releases small quantities of anti-matter, a large degree of waste heat, and gravity waves. Depending on the reactor, the ratio of byproducts produced can be controlled; in a plasma weapon virtually no gravity waves are released. Rather, large amounts of waste heat are used to superheat a thin helix of plasma, via Ionic Cyclotron Resonance. Packaged inside the innermost concentric magnetic "plasma" bubble, an aggregate of anti-protons is channeled from the reactor. The highly excited "plasma beam" is then accelerated and projected towards a target. In larger and more powerful plasma cannons, a higher rate of acceleration can be achieved. The CP-3 has an average muzzle velocity of 220 kilometers per second (compared to 11 kps for a plasma pistol). Only the plasma cannons mounted on alien Battleships are marginally more powerful.

While the beam dissipates very quickly in an atmosphere, giving it only an effective range of 50 to 60 kilometers, it has greater speed and an almost unlimited range in the vacuum of space. In that environment, targeting and hitting a maneuvering ship becomes the major difficulty, limiting the beam to an effective range (given a small and evasive target) of only 900 to 1000 kilometers. On impact with a target, the plasma sphere disintegrates and interacts with the antimatter core. The combination of already superheated plasma, the matter-antimatter annihilation, and the high speed collision all combine to do extensive damage.

As with the CL-3 Laser Cannon, once within range of a target, an illumination laser is used to determine range, speed and bearing as well as provide lock on. Following deactivation of the weapon safety, the laser designator takes over for the radar system, and automatically adjusts the aim of the plasma cannon and fires given a high hit percentage. This means that the human pilot can concentrate on navigation and evasive maneuvers, while the weapons automatically track and engage. A higher degree of accuracy is achieved using this system than is otherwise possible when reliant entirely on human reaction speeds.

When a CP-3 Fenrisulven's automatic targeting is activated, X-COM pilots use the brevity code "Beam Active" in radio communication, to announce the activation of beam-based automatic targeting and engagement.

**CF-2C "Fusion Ball" Launcher  
Accelerated Elerium Annihilation Device Expendible Exotic Munition (AEADEEM)**

The CF-2C is a second generation derivative of alien "Blaster Bomb" technology. This makes the AEADEEM a guided explosive; unlike a Blaster Bomb, however, a so called "Fusion Ball" rarely uses predetermined waypoints. Instead, it seeks and pursues a target much like a missile. The difference is that a Fusion Ball has all the maneuverability of a UFO and then some. This means that it is almost guarantees to hit, and its powerful warhead ensures that when it does, it hits with tremendous force.  
Like a Blaster Bomb, a "Fusion Ball" is basically a small self-contained and automated and autonomous UFO. At the heart of the weapon is an Elerium-115 Reactor that generates primarily gravity waves and anti-matter, and very little waste heat. Like with a Blaster Bomb, the small amount of anti matter produced by the reactor is collected within cyclotron oriented pockets inside the reactor housing, and stored there in tiny magnetic bottles. Similarly, just as with Blaster Bombs, Fusion Balls have a limited operational reactor time during which they exhaust their Elerium-115 supply. This determines the speed and duration of the flight: the shorter the flight, the faster the Fusion Ball goes, the longer the flight, the slower it goes.

However, because Fusion Balls have to pursue an evasive target, a sophisticated internal computer manages the energy supply, regulating the speed. Thus, a Fusion Ball displays a much more uniform performance in flight than a Blaster Bomb, though is fired from short range, it will travel much more quickly than if fired from long range. In general, the speed of a Fusion Ball varies between 15,000 and 40,000 kilometers per hour.  
Approaching a target, the ball orients its "face" towards the point of impact. On impact, the body of the Fusion Ball crumples and deforms. In addition to the kinetic energy of the impact itself, the accumulated excited antimatter interacts with the matter around it, producing a tremendous explosion up and into the target. On an atomic scale, energetic plasma forms around points of contact between matter and antimatter, spreading the energy release over milliseconds and generating more heat and blast than hard radiation. This "Fusion" annihilation/interaction gives the weapon its nickname.

The CF-2C is the most ship mounted powerful weapon in the X-COM Arsenal, with impressive range and tremendous power, it is effective against any and all alien craft. However, it has very limited ammunition per launcher, and each Fusion Ball represents a significant investment in irreplaceable Elerium-115. As such, it is generally only authorized for use against alien Battleships and Terror Ships.

When a CF-2C is launched, X-COM pilots use the brevity code "Fox Five" in radio communication, to announce the firing of an expendible exotic munition (or EEM for short).

**Alien Shield and Stealth Systems**

Alien stealth technology relies on the interception and absorption of electromagnetic waves. While the aliens do not use radar absorbent materials in the human fashion, UFO hulls are designed to conduct an electromagnetic interference field. This field jams, distorts and scrambles electromagnetic waves, making conventional target acquisition via radar or even the naked eye problematic. Note that this does not turn the UFO invisible in any way. Rather, it distorts its appearance. A UFO can thus appear "wavy" or "mirage-like" or it can look like a "streak" or a "pulsing dot" of varying size and/or intensity.

The use of an Elerium-115 Reactor for propulsion in a UFO has additional benefits in the form of a sort of "shield" system. This special feature of the hull is due to its unique construction, wherein the hull of the UFO is used to conduct, amplify, and shape the gravity waves produced in the Elerium Reactor. Looked at as a cross section, the gravity field produced by a UFO resembles the magnetic field of a planet, with the exception that a UFO produces both an "external" and "internal" field. The internal field is also called the inverted or reciprocal field. This internal field keeps the ship gravity neutral and seemingly inertia-less, even as the external field can bloom to hundreds of times normal gravity as it pulls the ship in a given direction.

A side effect of the external gravity field (which expands and contracts in different directions as the ship maneuvers) is that it forms a donut shaped shield bubble capable of redirecting projectiles, or overpressure waves. The gravity shield produced by the propulsion system in this way is notably less effective against laser or plasma weaponry.

**Alien FTL Systems**

It is believed that the aliens transit through interstellar space through the use of a wormhole FTL drive system. This is largely speculative, based on interrogation of alien leaders and engineers. The vast majority of UFOs in the Sol System seem to travel using conventional gravity drives. Outside of an atmosphere, in the vacuum of space, it is possible to reach near-relativistic speeds using alien gravity drives. X-COM probes launched using micro-Elerium reactors have reached transit speeds of .6c without difficulty. It seems possible that a trip from Earth to Mars, using for example an Avenger Fighter/Transport, could take as little as 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the relative orbital positions of the two planets.


End file.
